I want to remember or share

three big authors saying similar things about social scalability from different disciplines

2024-09-10T19:26:00.006-04:00

1. Osamu Dazai - No Longer Human (1948) - something about where is the line between the individual and society?

2. Anna Tsing - Mushroom at the End of the World (2015) - something about the difficulty of scaling between the small local to global ecological-economic phenomena

3. Tim Morton - All Art is Ecological (2021) - something about how many individual(s) create climate change?

(will fill in specifics later)

do you remember the eclipse?

2024-06-21T10:30:00.008-04:00

do you remember the eclipse? I didn't have the glasses and I was in Morning Heights, Manhattan, with an old half-frame camera, so I took pictures through a different lens, which I found more exciting than the eclipse! today I received the scans of those photos. #olympusPenF

"global nomad" visas are not a good solution to today's economic crises and tiktok fantasies

2024-06-14T00:04:00.012-04:00

With the increase of "global nomad" visas (Japan, Spain, Portugal) we are going to see more and more middle-upper class and upper-class adults, a high percentage of foreigners, evicting locals (and their businesses, their deep-rooted social lives, etc.) from the centers of city's. Not all cities, but those that are safe (not US), have nice public transportation, cultural activities, and decent weather.

As this occurs, we will see corporations trying to recreate and sell cultural atmospheres of how life "used to be," locally, before this expulsion. By cultural atmospheres, I'm referring to cultural consumer products that people sell and that recreate some local historical or traditional aspects, for example, films, posters, hotel interior designs, etc. These local cultural fabrications of the past, of course, are acritical and say nothing of how we got from point A (past) to point B (present). In other words, info about the mistakes and the humans that made the poor decisions, are nowhere to be found. So we don't learn and this expulsion, economic polarization between rich and poor, increases.

Then a socio-economic divide will grow thicker between locals and non-locals. The local economy will split between (for instance, in Spanish cities: el precio normal vs. el precio turista).

Are you saying that an innocent nomad visa is related to a global split between rich and poor?!

Yes!

So you also benefit from this wrongdoing.

Yes...

(A long time ago, I wrote about this in the article, "La Barcelona nostálgica." Maybe I should update it...)

2024-05-20T23:03:00.000-04:00

What's hard about being a cultural spectator is that it makes you fall in love with humanity, makes you feel big feelings and makes you dream of big things. And reality is the opposite. So you have to mediate these two.

Toronto

2023-11-26T11:22:00.009-05:00

I was in Toronto for 5 days last week and it was a time of lots of learning, so I wanted to write something for my imaginary audience quickly before I forget. I was attending my 1st AAA (Anthropology) conference and it was really eye-opening and inspiring. There were hundreds of innovative panels on hundreds of unconventional topics, every facet of everyday life was being scrutinized through a critical social lens, from coffeeshop communication to cassette tapes, from Japan’s aging problem in the countryside to gamete donors in Spain! Each research presentation was a real presentation written for the audience (vs. reading a paper), so the audience (and I) understood the presentations, which generated very good long conversations after each panel. (The conference organizers put a great deal of emphasis on accessibility, I was grateful.) I think all this is what Cultural Studies wanted to do, but doesn't often do. One thing that surprised me is that folks at the conference who study human culture self-identify and present themselves with a lofty noun: anthropologists. How does one acquire a noun-title based on a discipline, when does it start and when does it end? I am curious about this as I like the sound of saying "I'm a ________." It gives a bit of relief to one's existential crisis! But I've never heard of anyone calling themselves as such until the conference.

Besides that, I got to explore the city of Toronto. Things I liked:

running into and talking to the owner of the original Kim’s Convenience,

walking around with my nephew Arveen,

eating delicious vegetarian Vietnamese food at #SaigonLotus,

running into and exploring a very good camera shop #downtowncameratoronto,

staying at a hostel above a jazz cafe,

and being able to walk to the train station and take the train to the airport!

Things I didn’t like:

US-style macho aggressive driving/car culture. I saw too many cars pressuring pedestrians to hurry across the street.

Also, the city’s leaders have sold the city to millionaires and speculators. There’s nowhere central or semi-central for middle- and lower-income residents (like the fictional and real owners of convenience stores) to live.

lively simile from Dahl's "Rat Catcher"

2023-09-29T18:31:00.004-04:00

"The word 'rats' came out of his mouth with a rich, fruity sound as if he was gargling with melted butter."

Brilliant!

CD = music/accesible community Shibuya Tower Records

2023-06-28T09:26:00.005-04:00

In Shibuya, Tokyo there remains a Tower Records. Some may remember Tower Records from the 1990s. The Tower Records in Shibuya is massive, there must be some 6-8 floors of new CDs and vinyls. When I entered the building yesterday, I was mind-boggled and impressed! In the US, I haven't seen any major stores selling new CDs since the early 2000s. I had given up on CDs in 2012 when I left New Zealand and didn't want to travel with the weight. Since then, over the years, I had complained to family members and friends about how complicated it is nowadays to simply play an album. You can turn on Youtube or Spotify, but they're full of commercials, interruptions, and glitches. You can pay for those services, but who are you paying? Where? And even if you pay for those services, you still can't simply play the album chronologically, you have to make sure everything is charged, logged in to, or connected to Bluetooth (which for me, a hearing aids wearer, nearly always takes several attempts). Meanwhile an anonymous source take your cookies and personal data. And then you forget your password, or the internet is down, or your credit card expires, or they won't let you cancel!! Uggh!

I spent 9 years without music until two years ago when my other half gifted me a straight-forward single CD player. It's so easy, you just make sure it's plugged in, you push Eject, insert a CD, and that's it! It works 100% and it has made my life better. But it was tricky to find new CDs, most artists in the US don't sell their music in CD format anymore.

Returning to Shibuya on a hot sunny summer day. Tower Records. It was full of people of all ages browsing CDs, talking to their friends and the salespeople about albums, people listening to CDs together with store-owned headphones. Tokyo (so it seems to me) is good at maintaining things, especially older technology. What I saw at Tower Records didn't seem like a nostalgia fad or trend, but a continued and sincere interest in old and new music. Tower Records is obviously a business, but a pretty accesible (and now small) one where the positive social life seems to outweigh any harm. The CDs cost around what they costed in the 90s, $15-17 USD (plus 10% tax free discount for foreigners).

A couple observations occurred to me:

1) the face-to-face community that used to exist around music isn't there as much as it used to be. It might exist in Tokyo (with all their 165 live jazz cafes), and maybe in some college dorms, but I don't see it elsewhere. Sometimes people share Spotify playlists, and occasionally I will "save" something on Youtube, but I don't end up listening for the reasons above. The excitement and socialization are not there anymore, not like it was with a mixed tape/CD. Time has sped up, capitalism has become more exploitative, politics are in the way, and life has become more solitary and virtual. At Tower Records I ended up buying two new CDs (Japanese artists: Shibusashirazu and Humbert Humbert) and I got excited walking home with these in my backpack, I was going to enjoy this--albeit alone!

2) most albums are already uploaded to Youtube. So why buy the material form? For me, it was for convenience and to support the artist.

3) there's a shrine to Michael Jackson on the 7th floor of Tower Records alongside a table overflowing with fresh flowers.

3 flags seen hanging from Madrid balcones, late May 2023

2023-06-03T17:11:00.010-04:00

- "SOS" in Chueca = housing prices are unaffordable

- yellow in Lavapiés = against drug dealing occurring in the neighborhood

- Spanish flag several neighborhoods = increased nationalism (V0x)

defending slow creative work

2023-04-01T08:44:00.005-04:00

I just heard in a documentary that it took Leonard Cohen 7 years to write the song "Hallelujah."

"Ducking away to write feverishly. If writing two words a day is a fever."

Why the city?

2023-02-04T15:31:00.004-05:00

"The city is the place where women had choices open up for them that were unheard of in small towns. and rural communities. Opportunities for work. Breaking free of parochial gender norms. Avoiding heterosexual marriage and motherhood. Pursuing non-traditional careers and public office. Expressing unique identities. Taking up social and political causes. Developing new kinship networks and foregrounding friendship. Participating in arts, culture, and media. All of these options are so much more available to women in cities."

--Leslie Kern

Glorias Fuertes, things and two poems translated

2023-01-23T15:28:00.005-05:00

I'm teaching a class about the agency/power of everyday things and objects (of the Spanish-speaking world). We are starting with some poems by Gloria Fuertes and Pablo Neruda. I could not find translations to Fuertes's poems, so I translated them in case anyone in this cyber space is interested:

Things, Our Things [Las cosas, nuestras cosas]

Things, our things,

they like to be loved;

my table likes me to rest my elbows,

the chair likes me to sit in the chair,

the door likes me to open and close it

just as wine likes me to buy it and drink it,

my pencil falls apart if I pick it up and write,

my closet trembles if I open it and peek in,

the sheets are sheets when I lie on them

and the bed complains when I get up.

What will become of things when there are no more people?

Like dogs, things don't exist without their owner.

----------

The Typewriters [Las máquinas]

The dreary office

humanized itself at night

there was a light typing sound.

The typewriters were writing

--to one another--

love letters.

sleds instead of cars

2023-01-11T11:06:00.001-05:00

a sustainable form of urban transportation ; )

first two photos taken with iphone, last with Pentax 35mm MZ-5

Los Espookys

2022-11-30T14:00:00.022-05:00

I can really relate to Tati. My favorite line by her is (something along the lines of):

"I'm in the past, present, and future, that's why I act weird."

Other things I like about Los Espookys

- very clever smashing together of Spanish/English/Spanglish

- unproblematic smashing together of youth and adulthood

- humorous critique of the bourgeoisie, American imperialism, material excess, (white) elitism of both the US and Latin America

- unproblematic gender bender

- rare pan-US Latinx/Latin American collaboration

- deadpan/dry/cheesy humor

- esperpento: silly exaggeration of situations reflects real-life stupidity

- humorous pastiche aesthetics (surrealism, kitsch, B films, 1980s, 1990s, and probably other styles)

- Tati's out-of-place clothing (1990s US teen suburbia)

- all of this being made accessible to a huge public (HBO Max)!

Thank you Ana Fabrega and Julio Torres!

CDs

2022-04-12T13:51:00.015-04:00

When I left New Zealand in 2012, I gave my CD player to one of my students. It was a bright red portable one. Since then, I really haven’t listened to music other than the random songs that come out of Spotify/Pandora when I go to the gym, almost never. During the pandemic I realized how inconvenient and complicated it has become to watch TV or to listen to the radio or a music album. Yesterday I received an Air Mail package (yippee!) from Escorial street in Barcelona. It was 8 colorful CDs from 3 different contemporary Catalan musicians #manel, #antoniafont, #amicsdelarts, and I realized the extent that streaming digital music misses out on the full album experience. Streaming music is like only looking at a tiny fragment of a painting or reading just one page of a book. … No more plastic that gets broken. No more wifi glitches or commercial interruptions! The CDs came in a little matte colorful hand-size books with playful art work, and inside of that there’s a smaller book with more artwork and the song lyrics. The songs are related to designs and textures. Tactile poems (a tactile experience) and visual work. Is it nostalgia or just a more expansive experience? Probably both!

tiny messymates

2020-09-08T15:25:00.006-04:00

"I love the fact that human genomes can be found in only about 10 percent of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body; the other 90 percent of the cells are filled with the genomes of bacteria, fungi, protists, and such, some of which play in a symphony necessary to my being alive at all … I am vastly outnumbered by my tiny companions; better put, I become an adult human being in company with these tiny messmates. To be one is always to become with many."

-Donna Haraway, When Species Meet

In Place/Out of Place

2020-07-30T11:33:00.006-04:00

"...the word place turns up in common phrases such as "a place for everything and everything in its place" or "know your place" or "she was put in her place." In these expressions the word place clearly refers to something more than a spatial referent. Implied in these terms is a sense of the proper. Something or someone belongs in one place and not in another. What one's place is, is clearly related to one's relation to others. In a business it is not the secretary's place to sit at the boss's desk, or the janitor's place to look through the secretary's desk. There is nothing logical about such observations; neither are they necessarily rules or laws. Rather they are expectations about behavior that relate a position in a social structure to actions in space. In this sense "place" combines the spatial with the social — it is "social space." Insofar as these expectations serve the interests of those at the top of social hierarchies, they can be described as ideological. The example of the business can be extended to society as a whole. Just as the business has a social hierarchy, society has levels of power and influence related to class, gender, race, sexuality, age, and a host of other variables. Similarly, the building in which the business is located has spatial divisions, and the world outside is divided up into segments—houses, streets, public places, libraries, shops, and so on. Just as in the business, there are expectations about behavior in these places that are related to positions in the social structure. Many of these expectations are written into law. Most, however, remain unstated and taken for granted."

konstructor by lomography

2020-07-02T01:13:00.004-04:00

quarantine fun!

Komagome with 1980s Olympux XA with Kodak 400TX B+W 35mm film

2019-08-04T15:34:00.014-04:00

[you can click to see larger]

define beauty // Yamanashi June 2019 (Fujifilm 16mm f/2.8)

2019-06-14T15:47:00.018-04:00

[you can click to see larger]

In these digital pics I tried to capture the sublime feeling of an ineffable otherworldly day at Hosokawa sensei and Takami san’s house, two hours southwest of Tokyo. I didn’t have a tripod, so I used any flat surface I could find.

(Unfortunately, I couldn’t capture the fragrant smells: after-rain pine, cedar, tatami (straw), raw wood and some kind of sweet grass.)

Hosokawa sensei and Takami san helped design their house–the most sublime and original house I’ve ever been in–I call it the “ki no ie” (tree house). The design is simple, light, and vertical. It consists of 4 raw wood floors with two hollow square centers, like wood lofts on top of one another, each floor and each room are visibly connected to the others. There are NO interior walls between the rooms or floors! (A little bit as if an American backyard deck was in the shape of the number 8 and was replicated and stacked on top of one another, but more solid).

Then there was the generous vegetarian meal they made for us. Most of the ingredients (bamboo shoots, mushrooms, “amasake” = a hot sweet rice drink) came from their garden or the nearby mountains, and, of course, so beautifully presented.

Then there was the study or seminar space as one of Hosokawa sensei’s retirement projects. (This will be a dream for many professors.) He created the “seminar no ie” (seminar house) an independent retreat space for linguistics/pedagogy grad students to come and study and hold seminars or “tertulias”! Again, the same warm bright wood, tatami architecture, and fresh wood smell.

The overcast weather saturated the color and made everything rich and quiet like a novel.

If that wasn’t enough!… another retirement project (and another professorial dream): with their students and artist friend, Ryu Motosugi, they built a cafe gallery, シュマン・デュ・ボヌール（chemin du bonheur）!

Lastly, gentle company and conversation amongst 5 people who didn’t share a common language but who spent their lives studying how to communicate with those whom we don’t share a common language!

Here’s to creativity and kindness! ありがとうございます！

Shibusashirazu Orchestra at the Pit Inn, Shinjuku

2019-06-01T22:20:00.006-04:00

Last night I saw what was maybe the most exciting performance I've ever seen. I don't have the music vocabulary to describe it, and from what I've read online, their whole concept is to be undescribable (their name, Shibusashirazu Orchestra, translates to "Don't Be Cool Orchestra"). those who know me know I'm all about "heterogeneity" and flexibility and that's what this group performed. for 2 hours they fused and improvised jazz, 1950s exotica, psychedelic, rock, ska, klezmer, other sounds I had never heard before, and whatever visually inspired all that. i kept thinking of the D+G's idea of exploiting the medium to see what experiences it can create. that's what they did. it was loud. instruments made sounds that I didn't know they could make. and to add to that, my hearing aids, which always distort sound and differently in each ear, fit the situation well (but were triggered in ways they weren't programmed to deal with, the right one was capturing high frequencies as loud squeals, I had to remove it, so what I describes only comes from my left ear). when the big instruments rested, i could hear the xylophone, like turquoise water, it was really nice. the bananas reminded me of Dalí's baguettes. And as was typical of Tokyo jazz clubs, the space was tiny, air was thick, everything was sensorially dense and shaking, no screen mediation (except my phone). I wish I had had a better camera with me. this video clip is from my old phone.

thanks to Toko Shiiki, without her I would have never come across this, all their public info is in Japanese. thank you, Toko!

Olympus XA with B+W 35mm film Foma Retropan Soft

2019-05-10T16:13:00.025-04:00

over-exposed, low contrast, and with a lot of grain.

I’m attracted to messiness, blurriness, and long exposures because as I get older and as a sure-fail level of perfection and productivity is more and more demanded around us, these other characteristics are a welcoming respite and they visually articulate my sensorial experience and my default state of mind (which is almost always looking backwards confusingly)

really, the results remind me of a flashback within a Fellini movie or some of the 1920s architecture magazines from Barcelona

2019-02-23T15:23:00.001-05:00

"...procesos de de desclasificación [...] dejamos de ser lo que representamos y dejamos de hacer lo que nos está asignado y nos mostramos capaces de una voz y una acción que ni teníamos ni nos era legítima. [...] dejar de estar "clasificados", es decir, organizados socialmente en clases o categorías."

(Marina Garcés talking about Jacques Rancière)

this is why I always attracted to the idea of mess,

messing things up like shuffling cards around on a table,

it can be liberating and inclusive to confront these fears,

this is what my book is about, messing up public space (and this is why my book never ends),

when I was in elementary school I liked telling my classmates that my initials spelled MES,

the person who marries outside their ethnicity or economic class,

the high school student who gets accepted to an ivy league but chooses community college instead or accepts but sends his/her identical twin instead,

the straight man who majors in women and gender studies,
wearing gym clothes to an interview,

finding platonic love with a cat,
(there's always a cat)

the cereal boxes that were stocked upside down and in the wrong aisle,

the neurosurgeon who reduces his/her hours in order to take a part-time job as a migrant cropper,

the white-haired colleague who doesn't check email,

the CEO who falls in love with an incarcerated person who is physically paralyzed,

the meeting room with no tables or chairs,

the person walking on the side of the highway to get to/from the grocery store,

glitches,

typos carved in stone,

misprnounced

bombas y tijeras

2019-01-08T17:38:00.000-05:00

este artículo es alucinante, en texto e imágenes.
un triple proceso de recopilar la casas, la vida y las imágenes fragmentadas por el tiempo y el humano.
el bombardeo --> el montage --> un artículo de CTXT
cemento/bombas, papel/tijeras, ojos/pantalla
por nuestro colega Sebastiaan Faber
muy util para lxs que enseñan cultura visual/historia material en español

La extraña vida póstuma de un inmueble madrileño y otras historias de la Guerra Civil

notes - Barcelona public spaces changes observed btwn summer 2017 and summer 2018

2018-08-14T15:25:00.003-04:00

new full length benches on Travessera de dalt and gran via

Electric scooters everywhere, on the sidewalks

(Spatial tactics ) nature not fitting. Dogs peeing, trying to scrape the cement to cover up their pee

More deliveroo types, Glovo

Less sewage smell

More donut, hamburger, taco bell, and empanadas, japanese food, finger food, empty Chok chocolaterías

fewer chatarreros

more english in public

lazos amarillos

Posters announcing barri meetings

Germenetes -- reivindicación to turn the old Modelo jail into a self-governed cultural center

Chatarreros hang out place - Hort de Sant Pau

Around sant antoni many new benches installed for new upscale market

Encants market -- circular racial/economic/legal strata

Por una política de la escucha: entrevista a Jordi Carmona sobre Hannah Arendt y el 15M

2018-05-22T19:41:00.001-04:00

socialmente útil y multi-aplicable:

eldiario.es/interferencias/15M-Hannah_Arendt-escucha_6_772782718.html

[. . . ] "la escucha tiene que ver con cierta decisión casi inicial del 15M de no buscar representantes y apostar por la igualdad. Desde esa decisión se presupone que todo el mundo tiene algo que aportar o que decir. Y no son malas condiciones para escucharse. Si hay alguien que encarna la autoridad, pues se escucha a esa figura y punto, si es que se escucha a alguien. Pero si estás en un movimiento más plural, en el que la autoridad no es claro dónde está, entonces la palabra de cualquiera cobra valor. Lo que importa no es que el otro diga la verdad, lo más justo o que esté en la vía revolucionaria verdadera. Lo que importa es escuchar porque eso favorece la emancipación política del otro. Favorece una palabra inesperada del otro, una palabra que puede hacer que recoloques tus esquemas sobre lo que son las cosas.

Amador: Recuerdo que a veces alguien que hablaba en asamblea se ponía nervioso y los que estaban escuchando agitaban las manos para alentar con ese gesto a que esa persona continuara. Y es que esa persona que titubeaba estaba intentando encontrar sus propias palabras. Pero recuerdo también cómo los brazos se levantaban en aspas como muestra de rechazo cuando se notaba mucho que alguien se traía un discurso ya cocinado de casa, sin escucha de lo que pasaba en la plaza.

Jordi: En las asambleas había una preocupación enorme porque cualquiera hablase, especialmente las personas que podían tener menos carisma o facilidad de palabra. Es la idea de “inclusividad” tan importante en el 15M. Cuando escucho al otro, estoy incluyéndolo. Y más aún cuando es una persona que tal vez nunca participó en ese tipo de procesos, que no tiene mucha seguridad para hablar en público, etc. Esta especie de interés a priori sobre lo que va a decir el otro es una de las grandes fuerzas de los movimientos como los que tuvieron lugar en las plazas de todo el mundo." [. . . ]

articulating my kiwi experience 5.5 years later

2018-01-11T18:16:00.000-05:00

Two aspects I really enjoyed about working in New Zealand were: (1) the extremely diverse English words and accents. NZ English takes bits and pieces from the native Maori peoples, Pacific Islanders, the UK and Asia. a linguist's dream! I learned a lot of new words there. (2) my students’ personalities. I shouldn’t generalize, but in general, they were very humble, attentive, sensitive, unrushed, and curious.

In the last days before I left it occurred to me that I may never hear that linguistic diversity again, at least not the way it was at that moment, so I decided to record some of the people who were around. Some of the people whom I recorded I had gotten to know closely over 3 years, others I had just recently met that last semester.

I’ll spare the long and sappy drama, and just say that, even though I remember my time in NZ everyday, after I left I didn’t have the guts to open those video files. they sat on my external hard drive for 5.5 years. but today, with time and good company, I decided to open them up, face some of the emotions, and put them together in iMovie.

Here you have 10 kiwis talking about their worries and their morning routines:

One thing that strikes me when I watch the videos is that they were recorded BEFORE the smartphone invasion, and I wonder if that attributes to a more relaxed and focused atmosphere.

Another thing I noticed is that I hear the NZ English in a simultaneous dual way. one is, I guess, an automatic natural way in which I listen and understand fluidly because, even though I don’t hear this way of speaking anymore, I went through the process of learning it many years ago, the knowledge is back there in my brain and it didn't have any trouble being retrieved. The second way of hearing the speech is through what I imagine my audience (mainly American-English and Spanish speakers) will hear—kiwi English for the first time, not understanding the local references or some of the words.

The video clips are obviously very personal, but I’m sharing them because for me it’s cathartic and also because, even though these will be just brief clips of strangers for the viewer, maybe one can also appreciate or learn something from the content. and maybe for the young or depressed, it might show that the planet is still big, and there are still other livelihoods out there.

Beds in the Plazas

2017-07-19T19:06:00.002-04:00

Recap in English-- Barcelona has been experiencing a housing crisis for the last 2 decades, it's gotten much worse since the economic crisis (2008ish) because many have returned to investing in mass tourism as a way to boost profit, but the only ones increasing their earnings are the ones who were economically fine to begin with. Part of this mass tourism industry is turning flats over to short-term foreign residents and tourists who will pay 2-4 times as much for a room or apartment. As a result, it has become near impossible for a local to continue living in Barcelona, where they grew up/where they work/where they pay taxes to their city. Many of these flats/apartments on airbnb are illegal and the grassroots mayor, Ada Colau, is trying to regulate this so locals can find housing (and avoid a Manhattan or San Francisco type of situation where only the wealthy get their way). Today they've started a creative campaign to raise awareness about this problem. They put beds in the plazas (public everyday space!) with a multilingual sign that explains the problem.

"El Ayuntamiento de Barcelona puso en marcha ayer en las calles más céntricas de la ciudad una impactante campaña comunicativa en contra de los alojamientos turísticos ilegales. El Consistorio colocó camas en la vía pública y, junto a ellas, carteles en varios idiomas que informaban: “Que esta cama esté disponible en internet no significa que sea legal”."

https://elpais.com/ccaa/2017/07/18/catalunya/1500405327_368916.html?id_externo_rsoc=FB_CC

differences (mostly commercial) spotted in downtown Barcelona between June 2016 and July 2017

2017-07-16T20:03:00.003-04:00

- más hamburgueserías estilo EEUU, gourmet (Les Corts, Gracia, Eixample, Gótico...)

- los tatuajes se han puesto de moda entre los jóvenes (~18-30 años)

- nueva chocolatería Chok-franquicia

- muchas tiendas botique para mujeres y turistas buscando cosas "hechas en Barcelona" (Gracia, Eixample)

- más tiendas de alquilar bicis

- nuevo servicio al domicilio Deliveroo (parecido a UberEats que también se estrenó este año)

- varias nuevas tiendas de calzado tradicional (alpalgartas, ibicencas) "hecho en España" (Gracia, Gótico, Born...)

- más tiendas de jamón serrano, se vende una porción para llevar

- dos nuevos tipos de contenedores que complican sacar cosas (complicar la vida de los chatarreros)

- construcción en la Travessera de Dalt y El Paralelo terminada

- más bancos por Paralelo

- más tiendas de comida ecológica

- el Banc Expropiat (en C/ Travessera de Gracia) fue cerrado el verano pasado, volvió a abrirse en el barrio del Putxet y al lado del viejo local se abrió un local nuevo "El Sucursal del Banc Expropiat"

- más fruterías en Gracia

- el supermercado-franquicia Condis se ha encargado de por lo menos dos tiendas antiguas de comestibles

- más restaurantes usando una carta multilingue de papel que los clientes rellenan con un lápiz para pedir su comida (evitando conversación)

- en Gracia, nuevas tiendas de helado-yogúr

Don't Lay Here! [Part 2]

2017-07-09T19:12:00.001-04:00

This is the #1 sneakiest don't-lay-here urban furniture I've ever seen. Very clever... These are the brand new benches behind the Boqueria market. With their creative human-body shape, they look fun and welcoming, and will be so for some people. But upon closer examination, they prevent anyone tired, non-conforming, or down-on-their-luck from laying down to rest. The metallic benches have a discreet vertical armrest between them, and the white ledges are slightly slanted both horizontally and also in the seat! So, if you were to try to lay down, you would roll off!
Bring a thick cushion!
PS- this was [part 1] http://megansaltzman.blogspot.com.es/…/08/dont-sit-here.html

gender + Spanish-language literature

2017-06-21T19:19:00.004-04:00

para los profes de literatura/cultura:

I’ve been studying about cultural phenomena in Barcelona for almost half my life and in the last years it’s become more and more obvious and bothersome to me that the ideas and images I have about the city (and much more--about myself, others…) come from a male perspective, from authors, artists, etc. "La ciudad de los arquitectos" is actually the city of male architects. For a city that is abundantly documented (in painting, literature, film…), very few women have documented it.

Anyway, today I returned to La Central bookstore on C/ Mallorca. La Central is, I'd say, Cataluña's most important regional bookstore. It’s known to have a wide selection of books and it's a place that involves the surrounding literary community.

I go to the long table of Literatura Contemporánea Española y Latinoamericana. Their selection in this category is not exhaustiva, but it's good, they generally carry what you're looking for. The last couple years I noticed that the display area in this section is very masculine. Today I was extra bothered by it and so I decided to count to see if I was just imagining things or if my annoying feeling was justified. (When it comes to equality issues there’s always the unfortunate logic that credibility depends on quantitive evidence.)

Hypothesis: The majority of the books on display were written by males.
Pop-up methodology: Count the books and assume typical sex and general first name association (i.e. Ignacio = male). Use google or the about-the-author pic for unfamiliar names (i.e. Harkaitz).
Results:
total books on display for Spanish and Latin American literature: 112
male sounding names: 80 (71.4% of the books)
female sounding names: 31 (27.7%)
VVAA edited book with a variety of authors: 1 (doesn’t matter %)

For me what’s most troublesome is that, being relatively familiar with this bookstore and knowing some people who work there, I’m pretty sure that they did not deliberately, intentionally, decide to exclude women writers. Most likely they select the books that they think their patrons will find interesting. It’s not even a super capitalistic bookstore (La Central doesn't advertise, they offer free public events, and there's little pressure to buy--people go in there and sit for hours reading books without buying them). My guess is that they and most customers don't notice the gender imbalance (I don't have any numerical evidence!). So there’s this element of naturalness, randomness, just is-ness within a "progressive" intellectual venue where one wouldn't expect to see such male domination. Which means, at least, that the origins of this are really deep and buried.

???

#femPlaça 16 julio 2017 Plaça Santa Maria

2017-06-17T15:12:00.000-04:00

Fem Plaça converged peacefully yesterday with the Free Hugs! movement, tourists, policemen, waiters, a giant Corona advertisement, kids, history, and much more, in the small Plaza de Santa Maria. An all-inclusive mess was made with chalk, hopscotch, water, informative pamphlets, chairs made of cardboard, and free enjoyment of public space.
¡Muchísimas gracias a los organizadores, los participantes, los vecinos y los transeúntes!

a lot more is going on here. for more info, I wrote about this more formally here: in english, in spanish.

La aventura de aprender // DIY desde Madrid

2017-01-15T13:05:00.001-05:00

Estas guías son una maravilla, sobre cómo podemos (tú, yo, nuestros estudiantes...) mejorar nuestros entornos. (En particular me parece que la guía de "hacer prototipos" nos puede servir a los académicos.)
Otras maneras de pensar y hacer las cosas. ¡Nos están esperando maneras más inclusivas!

let's think of alternatives

2016-12-12T12:28:00.001-05:00

Ozu, the mundane and simple

2016-12-09T12:39:00.001-05:00

for those feeling down these days, you may like to rest your mind on these mundane mise-en-scenes from Yasujiro Ozu's films. (you can click on them to see them larger.)

his last one is from Tokyo Story. Here Setsuko Hara ("Noriko") serves tea to her in-laws who have come for a visit.

Mapeo Colectivo / Collective Mapping - Urban Exploration

2016-10-11T23:05:00.002-04:00

The Manual de Mapeo Colectivo by the Argentine urban exploration collective Iconoclasistas has been translated to English. The entire book is available online for free here:
issuu.com/iconoclasistas/docs/manual_mapping_ingles .

inspiring couple hours with Ada Colau

2016-05-29T06:28:00.002-04:00

an exciting day yesterday at Barcelona en Comú's one year anniversary event at Estació Nord's park --

(instant notes) "Mes transparent, mes colaboratiu, mes humild... Recuperar les institucions per a la gent... Traballar per a una ciutat refugi... La influencia europea de Barcelona... Tenim molt camini... Hem sentit que tenim força social...Fer mes pera que la ciutadá sea protagonisme...tothom nosaltres tenim molta responsabilitat..." Afterwards, Q+A sessions. Questions/complaints related to: prostitution, airbnb pisos turísticos, fines for having posted something in public, cafe chairs taking over sidewalks...). Afterwards, 2-3 hours of big paella in the parque for which Colau sat with others and her 5 y/o old son. Not so many people present, maybe ~200, no security (!!!!, imagine if this were in the US), very low-key, some media was there, including independent film directors Cecilia Barriga (making documentary about female politicians) and Pau Faus (just released documentary on Ada Colau).

overall, Colau was extremely accessible, humble, energetic, "horizontal", and empathetic in words and actions. (A small-scale political model for the US.) I commend Colau for, among many other things, showing her vulnerable feelings (she was genuinely nervous, happy, friendly). Though usually excluded, these too are part of our politics. (I wanted to tell her about her influence in the US, but I imagined she was exhausted with such a long event and so many people coming up to hug/kiss/speak to her. So I just made eye contact and said, "¡gracias, Ada!" And she responded, "¡nos vemos!" ; )

nature and our current economic/education/culture crisis

2016-05-22T08:13:00.002-04:00

yesterday I found two original talks on the relationship between nature and our current economic/education/culture crisis.
1) last night was "nit de museus", "night of museums", where approximately all 60 of barcelona's museums were free and open till 1 in the morning (!!). loooong lines all over the city. i feel awkward in museums, but my housemate wanted to see the catalan modernism museum, so i went along with him. inside the museum the motif of nature/organicity was prominent in the paintings, posters, sculptures, and furniture pieces created BY and FOR the affluent 19th century burguesía catalana. (below, a photo of a snail handle on a closet that i identified with.)
2) more accessible and less visual, our colleague iñaki prádanos has been sharing ideas on today´s society/culture/economy in relation to ecology. i read his recent research piece “Degrowth and Ecological Economics” and contains some useful ideas and practical PROPOSALS (that students, politicians, voters, educators, big business people could use) to improve the quality and health of our communities at a time when our current economic/political system can no longer IGNORE the ecological/economic catastrophes that it is rapidly creating (as if the planet’s resources were infinite). our leaders' depletion of our natural resources is closely related to you and me, if not at the core of the problems we study (unemployment, poverty, immigration, mental well-being, education, history, sexism, crime, healthy food, discrimination...etc.).
“The economic system is nothing but a subsystem embedded in, and dependent on, the system of the biosphere. […] An economic system based on constant economic growth, global massive urban development, and an ever faster production and consumption of commodities is undesirable, destructive, unendurable, and unrealistic.” (p.147)

dibujos infantiles, guerra civil española

2016-04-07T11:07:00.000-04:00

http://www.yorokobu.es/dibujos-ninos-de-la-guerra-civil

y preguntas pedagógicas desde la página de la Brigada Abraham Lincoln: http://resources.alba-valb.org/lesson-plan-pictorial-narratives-from-children-in-war/#.VwaAQD_jJW0

fotografia España global recurso

2016-02-21T14:03:00.002-05:00

For humans teaching Spanish language +/o culture: here's the start of an experimental activity on photography if you'd like to use it. This could go in many different directions... and is not a comprehensive list.
docs.google.com/document/d/1VSBBsY8qHn8s5xFINK96EszgGBbBsjLTgjSoJZx9K70/edit

[Joan Colom, 1960, Barri Xino, Barcelona]

next virtual reality discussion: Lefebvre's Rhythmanalysis

2016-01-10T22:44:00.001-05:00

To those interested in theory related to urban space:
On Thurs. Jan 21 at 7pm Eastern US time we will discuss Henri Lefebvre's "Rhythmanalysis." This is a neat text on the rhythms, repetitions, and quiet hummings of our everyday contemporary urban life (maybe like street noise, store hours, traffic lights, doors opening/closing...). Unlike his other technical work on space, this text seems to be more focused on poetic types of temporalities in space. And since it's Lefebvre, I predict that the text will discern the capitalistic-political-philosophical life embedded in these rhythms. (I haven't read it yet.)
Like before, we'll be talking over a "virtual reality" platform (Second Life) which has its pros and cons (a con being that it can take a while to set up, so if you plan to join us, please give yourself time).
We usually talk in Spanglish/English/Spanish. Don't be shy, we are friendly!
If you need the text (I have it in English and Spanish), or help with set up, feel free to email me.
Basic instructions:
1. Download and install Firestorm:
http://www.firestormviewer.org/downloads/
2. Go to this URL address: (http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/cibola/26/180/28).
(If it's your first time, somewhere in that process, in Second Life, you have to create an avatar.)
Thanks!

articles post-elections in Spain

2015-12-21T11:27:00.001-05:00

A positive side to globalization.
How often does a political party announce a victory speech in two languages, one being for a universal public?
-- Communication that is knowledgeable of our global ties and unifies us in the struggle against social exclusion.
Video clip:

Spanish election: Podemos says results mean new political futu...
"Democracy has to reach the economy, so that human rights, as well as dignity, are not violated... history is ours, and it's the people who make it."Pablo Iglesias, the leader of Spain's left wing Podemos party reacts to achieving a fifth of the vote in the country's elections - and denying the ruling party a majority.
Posted by Channel 4 News on Monday, December 21, 2015

If you're interested in what happened in the Spanish elections yesterday, here is a good summary in English: http://inthesetimes.com/…/spain-2015-election-results-podem…
and the fine details of what happens next without a clear majority: http://elpais.com/…/…/12/21/inenglish/1450684257_190223.html

Similarly, browsing around for an article to use in class about (my hero) Ada Colau, I found her website--humble, activistic, and (again, unprecedented in Spanish politicas) in three languages: adacolau.cat/en/bio-completa .

ペコリ = pekoli

2015-11-28T19:41:00.000-05:00

ペコリ = pekoli = is onomatopoeia (a word created by its sound) for a deep bow of gratitude.

Medianeras 2

2015-11-08T00:47:00.000-05:00

from the lost Medianeras series, I just found this, I think it was around Travessera de Gràcia and C/ Ciudad Real (Barcelona)
Nov. 2011

wabi sabi

2015-10-29T10:11:00.002-04:00

dad has a camera on his cellphone now
so now I receive little gifts like this one
I've been reading about the Japanese aesthetic philosophy of "wabi sabi" and I can relate to it very much as a general way of life, I've found a little validation for some of my thoughts that often make me feel like the odd one out in this aggressive human ego competition that seeks perfection and superiority over one's fellow human being. I've always been fascinated with imperfection.
For me wabi sabi means resistance, kindness, difference, honesty.
Wabi sabi is an appreciation for and recognition of the fleeting imperfections and dependency in and around us:

"Wabi sabi embodies the nihilistic cosmic view and seeks beauty in the imperfection found in all things, in a constant state of flux, evolve from nothing and devolve back to nothing. Within this perpetual movement nature leaves arbitrary tracks for us to contemplate and it is these random flaws and irregularities that offer a model for the modest and humble. [. . . ] It embodies the melancholic appeal of the impermanence of all things. [. . . ] Impermanence, humility, asymmetry, and imperfect. These underlying principles are diametrically opposed to those of their Western counterparts, whole values are rooted in a Hellenic worldview that values permanence, grandeur, symmetry, and perfection..."
-A. Juniper

a phase that lasts for a couple months in which the dead person could have the ability to listen and also nod "ok"

2015-09-11T20:03:00.000-04:00

Why couldn’t there be a phase, for example, that lasts for a couple months during which a dead person could have the ability to listen and also nod “ok”? Why is it merely life to death? Response to no-response? That’s very extreme. Wouldn’t it make more sense if there was a transitional phase? That would make the mourning, and natural existence, much easier for plants and animals alike. …A, your beloved, is dead. You feel tremendous loss and emptiness, more than you can imagine. Sometimes You REALLY NEED to communicate this to A, to such an extent that you can feel the NEED in every tingling nerve in your body. But, even if you were to verbalize something, there’s no palpable way for A to HEAR or be conscious of what you need to tell him/her. Isn’t that awful? (Is this why men keep creating religions?) Why would nature take such a cruel binary form? On-off, life-death?

ACLA seminar proposal: Nomadic Waste & Ecological Materiality in Neoliberal Space (Hispanic Studies)

2015-08-08T10:50:00.000-04:00

Neoliberalism, consumer society, sends mass populations and material resources on rapid, nomadic itineraries around the planet, creating extreme abundance and scarcity in places we usually cannot see. Many of us interact with these objectified subjects or objects for a short amount of time—consuming and discarding resources without a second thought of where they come from or where they go after we discard them. As a result of the global economic crisis and our virtual connectedness, we are witnessing an increase in individuals and collectives who are re-appropriating, redistributing, and re-signifying the uneven flows of materiality—whether it be food, housing, cultural materials, trash, or ecological resources. The motives behind these initiatives may be for personal survival or for collective politics; regardless—their actions counter the neoliberal “order of things” as they perforate neoliberal spatial controls and often provide resources or agency to subjects that have none or very little (J. Rancière). We can think, for instance, of the politics of gleaners (chatarreros) who rummage and recycle trash; informal or black-market economies (piratería, top manta…); artists and activists that create Do-It-Yourself or advocacy projects with discarded or ecological goods (cartoneras…); and cultural centers and NGOs that establish self-sustainable “commons” such as food banks, urban gardens, second-hand supplies, or community currencies.

Many of these activities are initiated in globally expanding and ecologically depleted cities. And they straddle the lines between legality and illegality, public and private, visibility and invisibility, and the urban/periphery/rural (D. Mitchell, A. Merrifield). Many of them are dynamically networked and function via independent collectives, international connections, and social media. Given the increasing interconnections and parallels amongst these phenomena, this seminar aims to bring together and put in dialogue initiatives from many Spanish and Spanglish related speaking localities as well as their coexisting non-dominant language communities.

Our seminar hopes to mediate between fiction and non-fiction and the humanities and the socio-natural sciences in order to discuss pressing political, ecological, ethical, spatial, and cultural questions regarding waste and ecological resources in neoliberal space. For instance:

What does mapping the itineraries of discarded materials or their corresponding subjects reveal about neoliberal order and resistance, creativity, community, in/exclusion, political possibility? To what extent and for whom is resistance effective? What is needed to optimize these initiatives?
What forms of control (surveillance cameras, police, gentrification, economic capital, physical barriers…etc.) are these phenomena working with/against? And who specifically dominates these controls/barriers?
What types of engagements and results have emerged between autonomous initiatives and direct political protest? Between autonomous initiatives and government-corporate powers?
What do these material trajectories of use and non-use reveal about contentious temporalities?
What is or should be our role as researchers and educators within these urgent problems?

Plan: Early December participants will be asked to share one or two texts (of any type) that may be significant in thinking about and/or taking action in relation to these themes. The week before the conference we will share our written paper or work-in-progress by email. Finally, during the seminar days, we will meet 3 times across 2 or 3 days. During this time each presenter will present his/her ideas, images, and/or questions related to his/her research project.

Theoretical keywords (definitely not limited to--)
New Materialism, Eco-systems, Action Research, Globalization; Border/Transnational Studies, Urban Studies, Mobility Studies, Object Oriented Ontology, Anthropocene, Hispanic Cultural Studies.

Resulting Program: docs.google.com/document/d/1vj-41cg7bKX92ISaPRX3CwyOUYeylSDzRDmlf3_Qpz8/edit

(image from Vagabundos de la chatarra, Sagar & Carrión)

"A saber lo que arrojan por las ventanas a estas horas de la noche. Vecinos desesperados. En las redes hay botelas de cava, recipientes de plástico, medias y calcetines, condones y pájaros muertos..."

(from J. Marsé's, El amante bilingüe, image M. Saltzman, 2006.)

aaah calm everyday rhythms in Tokyo, .gifs

2015-08-03T16:57:00.006-04:00

From http://www.spoon-tamago.com/2015/08/03/nostalgic-gifs-of-everyday-life-in-japan-animated-by-yuuta-toyoi/

2015-08-01T00:28:00.002-04:00

I was walking down the hall and
I fell into a large puddle of super-glue.
A polar bear came to help me up.
I'm stuck.

"scent-scapes" and smellwalks

2015-07-24T15:17:00.001-04:00

Mapping the politics of urban smells: https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/researchers-maps-city-smells-smelly-maps

I've been thinking a lot about what Barcelona--a high-density odor-intense city--smells like. Of course the smells change with the season. In the summer the smells are more potent and shop doors are open, their AC and perfumed atmospheres pouring out into the streets.

bakeries,
cigarette smoke,
car/moto exhaust,
dried dog urine,
garbage from the contenedores,
cleaning liquids,
dry pine-earth smell from platanero trees,
perfume from clothing shops,
humid mold from the sewers.
in Madrid I smell more fried calamares and jamón.

Trees, parks, and green spaces are not as common in Mediterranean cities as they are in N. European cities. More trees are needed to purify and maintain oxygen in the air. (This summer 2015 several news articles have been published on the rising pollution in Spanish cities. I.e.: http://www.huffingtonpost.es/2014/05/07/ciudades-espanolas-contam_n_5280381.html).

Artist Kate Mclean has been mapping sensorial elements in cities (olfactory, tactile...). Check out: http://sensorymaps.com/

From Mclean's work, I arrived at Marta Calvo's smellwalks in Pamplona. http://sensorymaps.com/portfolio/smellmap-pamplona/

And several detailed maps by Cambridge University: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/06/07/maps-what-your-city-smells-like

my gimbap master

2015-07-22T22:19:00.001-04:00

I am posing this for when I have a bad day. ; )

La investidura de Ada Colau - vídeo

2015-06-13T19:11:00.002-04:00

Pro-inclusion humans were given political power today.
La investidura/swearing in of Ada Colau Ballano, as Barcelona of mayor, in la Plaça de Sant Jaume, alongside a swarm of human beings, many of them volunteers who have been working selflessly to try to improve social and political problems for the most vulnerable human situations in Barcelona.
To Colau's request, unlike previous investidura ceremonies in Barcelona, there were no barriers, red carpets, or expensive suits separating the people from their politicians.
I couldn't stay long (it lasted 3 hours and my back was killing me), but the keywords in Colau's speech were "CIUDAD"/city and "DEMOCRACIA PARTICIPATIVA"/citizen-based democracy.
Many other grassroots-based mayors and city councilors were sworn in across Spain today, an unprecedented number of women and minorities (race/nationality/religion/sexual orientation).
Hoping to see positive, more-inclusive changes soon.

investidura13junio2015 from MeSalt on Vimeo.

going back and forth between extremes

2015-06-05T12:07:00.001-04:00

Every time she returns to Xtown, the small town of XUniversity, an excellent school in the US where tuition runs $58,000 a year, she's shocked by the extreme social difference between these students and the students at state-university. Xtown students own high quality and fashionable clothes, shoes, and backpacks; their skin complexion is healthy looking; they are jogging; they are reading non-bestseller books. In public they interact politely, attentively, maturely, confidently, happily. Their hair looks naturally shiny and flowing. Obesity and fast food are absent. One can see a high level of conformity amongst the students of XUniversity, a lot of polo shirts, khakis, and brown loafers and, in the winter--beautiful leather riding boots, and for the rain--Hunter rain boots. The students of XUniversity are taller than your average college student. Visually they match closely to what one sees in contemporary Hollywood films that take place in California or NYC, but without all the make-up and hairspray. Since she's usually in Xtown at the beginning and end of breaks, she sees their parents too, because they visit Xtown around the same time. Many of the parents wear fine jewelry and drive nice cars. Like their offspring, they too have nice skin and shiny hair. She thinks, "What do these external decorations have to do with having access to top educational and employment opportunities?"
The image appears of the faces of some students at state-university, the faces of students who are stressed or depressed because they are working 40 hours a week while failing some of their classes. (But many students at XUniversity are also necessarily stressed or depressed. Is this system failing both parties?)
The conforming and acceptance of fashion styles parallels the conforming and acceptance of an extremely stratified educational system in the US. It annoys her that, in general terms, some students can have so little while others have so much, and when she talks with students from both extremes, it seems neither party is aware of the gap, two separate microcosms. She thinks, "But many of them are learning about these issues in the classroom, right? We know many students have to write papers about inequality because it's the hot topic that everyone studies at college... So, what's missing then?
Action?
Making personal connections/experiences outside the classroom?
Educating the trustees, administrators, politicians, and businesspeople?"
And then, in a matter of days, she gets used to it, the scene of comparison fades away and she gets used to the local scene again, the scene that initially seemed luxurious becomes normal, as it did when she was in grad school, and she stops being annoyed and starts enjoying the high quality; she browses rider boots on the internet. And since, in some ways, she also benefited from this stratified education system inequality, she wonder if some people think similar annoyed thoughts about her.

6 Lessons for the U.S. from Spain’s Democratic Revolution

2015-05-30T00:34:00.005-04:00

Really useful article for those teaching about Spain, political science, or social movements:

http://inthesetimes.com/article/18001/6-lessons-for-the-u.s.-from-spains-democratic-revolution

archivo del Seminario de ALCES "Geopolítica de la España global," Soria, Julio 2015

2015-03-01T19:06:00.000-05:00

En este seminario proponemos discutir el potencial político en los espacios cotidianos de las ciudades españolas, conscientes de sus raíces históricas y enfocándonos en la época contemporánea.

Los espacios públicos han sido drásticamente transformados y regulados en las últimas 2 – 3 décadas en España. La planificación urbana activa y local de los años 80 fue, en la década siguiente, rápidamente reemplazada por la especulación, la desterritorialización, la gentrification y el turismo de masas—todos ellos fenómenos que han estado operando bajo la lógica de un neoliberalismo global. Como consecuencia de ello, miles de edificios históricos fueron derribados, especialmente aquellos que pertenecían a clases más modestas, y los espacios públicos perdieron gran parte de su autonomía, espontaneidad, inclusión social e historia local y personal para convertirse en espectáculos de consumo privado y escaparates de una política desligada de la sociedad civil. Por lo tanto, nuestra pregunta principal es ¿qué se está haciendo en el día a día para volver a unir a los ciudadanos con su espacio local? O, en palabras de David Harvey, refiriéndose a una ciudadanía inclusiva: ¿cómo pueden“make a city more after their heart’s desire”?

Tanto consciente como inconscientemente, a través de los sentidos absorbemos gran cantidad de información al atravesar el espacio público. Las nuevas leyes de civismo, las cámaras de vigilancia, el mobiliario urbano, las grúas paradas, las fachadas multilingües, el sonido metálico del butanero con las bombonas y el olor de los contenedores forman y limitan nuestras vivencias urbana/s. Aunque el diseño del espacio neoliberal prioriza lo visual, todos los detalles sensoriales, grandes y pequeños, regulan nuestras actividades e identidades, forman nuestros conocimientos y nos adoctrinan tanto con un código de conducta como con una narrativa sobre la historia, la política y la economía.

Pero este fenómeno no ocurre de manera unidireccional. Como han escrito muchos otros urbanistas, el espacio público—al igual que la democracia—no es una entidad fija, neutral o monolítica. Los ciudadanos también tenemos cierta agencia en el espacio publico. De hecho, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán definió el espacio público como “aquello que se ganó contra los especuladores.” El espacio público es un resultado temporal y provisional de la contención entre diferencias; más lento o rápido, según las épocas, pero siempre está recreándose, rehaciéndose y resistiendo la homogenización y estasis. De este modo, la crisis económica actual ha vuelto a mostrarnos el espacio publico como el lugar primordial donde conviven, negocian y se enfrentan las diferencias humanas.

Las ciudades españolas son ciudades globales, y en ellas los poderes fácticos diseñan y/o mantienen el espacio público y una imagen-marca que excluye cualquier contradicción, precariedad, fealdad, o desorden (D. Mitchell, M. Delgado). En este sentido, tanto los momentos de gran relieve como las acampadas en plazas emblemáticas como las menos estudiadas prácticas cotidianas, como pueden ser dormir en el umbral, colgar la ropa o un mensaje del balcón, o tocar un instrumento o patinar en una plaza, se convierte en un acto, voluntaria o involuntariamente, que transgreden “el orden de las cosas,” vuelven a insertar la diferencia en la imagen urbana, y, por lo tanto, cuestionan las políticas de inclusión (J. Ranciére).

Animamos a que se unan a este seminario todas las personas interesadas en el estudio de la geopolítica cultural y cotidiana de la España contemporánea. (Tenemos en cuenta que lo “español” hoy en día puede encontrarse en cualquier lugar del mundo.) Abajo hemos señalado algunos puntos de fuga iluminadores que se mueven en las disciplinas de la arquitectura, geografía y antropología urbanas, pero que no han sido muy desarrollados en nuestro campo de estudios culturales peninsulares:

- geografías y prácticas lúdicas (de juego)
- topografías de los olores y/o los sonidos y/o texturas táctiles de la ciudad
- objetos cotidianos (basura, ruinas, materiales reciclados o desechados…)
- la periferia urbana (el extrarradio)
- prácticas espaciales de resistencia/antagonismo o espontaneidad
- mercados negros, economías elusivas o invisibles
- los itinerarios de los niños y/o los adolescentes y/o personas de las tercera edad
- respuestas espaciales a la crisis económica y/o de vivienda
- inmigración, presencia pública, geopolítica
- colectividades o intervenciones artísticas y activismo
- espacios auto-gestionados, apropiaciones y reclamaciones de autonomía (jardines urbanos, casas okupas, manifestaciones…)
- propuestas de mejora pública
- relaciones entre espacio virtual global y físico local
- el espacio público y la pedagogía/la enseñanza
- tribus urbanas

Programa final, verano 2015: docs.google.com/document/d/1mLVmm6S8Qzb1Bzs1PVseajxulkRPkMEzPHF3025mqf0/edit?usp=sharing

inter

2015-02-28T09:51:00.001-05:00

"Taking the first step toward understanding the social dynamics surrounding disability means recognizing that interdependency is the rule of human societies. We are all dependent [disabled] on others: for food, clothing, and medical care, for support networks, social opportunities."

B. Fraser

Y. Sakugawa

quantitative self-interest

2015-02-07T10:33:00.002-05:00

“our planetary urban fabric—the terrestrial texturing of our urban universe—is woven by a ruling class that sees cities are purely speculative entities, as sites for gentrifying schemes and upscale redevelopments, as machines for making clean, quick money in, and for disposing erstwhile public goods.” A. Merrifield - The New Urban Question

(Cell phone pics around Philadelphia today. Human remnants but no humans.)

visualization of the theory of everything

2015-01-20T13:31:00.003-05:00

To my friends and those teaching about culture (-al subjectivity). I'd like to share a visual message with you. I referred to this diagram at least one dozen times today in my film class. The nodes can represent people, texts, feelings, cities, cultural production processes, family, friends, histories, stereotypes, social movements, stars, bees, anythings. It's a visualization of the theory of Everything, or, Benjamin's constellation, D&G's assemblages and rhizomes. (What else?) I wish there was a way to add two aspects: 3-dimensionality and mobility. But we can imagine them...
From "A Special Message For You Hand-Delivered To You From The Universe", by the ingenious Yumi Sakugawa, 2012.

2015-01-11T22:37:00.001-05:00

the pedagogical myth, cell phones, and Rancière

2015-01-07T22:06:00.003-05:00

It seems that Rancière's collaborative and horizontal approach to teaching (see blurb below) presupposes that both parties (learners/teachers) are at least partially willing to give, learn, and contribute just for the sake of doing so. but how would this approach apply when one of the parties will only give/learn/contribute under immediate coercion (a punishment, a threat to lower one's grade or to force one to repay/retake a course...etc.)? Doesn't that immediate-capitalist-exchange mentality in the classroom (I-only-give-to-you-to-receive-for-me) automatically create separation and hierarchy? If one group won't put their cell phones down unless an authority figure threatens him/her, doesn't that resistance to learning perpetuate automatons and keep the wheel of severe social problems spinning? And/Or is it just an example cultural differences -- everyone has a right to their differences and it's our collective interest to try to learn together by incorporating the majority's culture including the younger generation's cell phone culture?
But now I'm back to where I started. "Collective interest". Collective in a pedagogical setting presupposes a will from more than one party.
??

(Rancière's text was published in 1991, before the iphone.)

"In the meritocracy those who know (or those who have the opportunity to set the standards of knowing) considered as experts have needed those who don't know and the ignorant in reproducing and legitimating their own privileged expert positions. These structural processes of legitimation belong to what Rancière describes as the pedagogical myth. The pedagogical myth divides the world into two by supposing a socially constructed division of power, as well as a lower and higher intelligence. As Rancière (1991, 7) points out:

[The pedagogical myth] says that there is an inferior intelligence and a superior one. The former registers perceptions by change, retains them, interprets and repeats them empirically, within the closed circle of habit and need. This is the intelligence of the young child and the common man. The superior intelligence knows things by reason, proceeds by method, from the simple to the complex, from the part to the whole. It is this intelligence that allows the master to transmit his knowledge by adapting it to the intellectual capacities of the student and allows him to verify that the students has satisfactorily understood what he learned."

Ref. http://eepat.net/doku.php?id=jacques_ranciere_on_radical_equality_and_adult_education

juxtaposition writes itself

2015-01-02T00:14:00.001-05:00

One thousand and one questions

2014-12-02T22:09:00.001-05:00

one of my life's highlights occurred last night. my 10 year old nephew, kind of a shy guy, was sitting on the couch in front of the tv. unexpectedly he turned away from the tv and began asking me questions. a couple questions turned into some 150 questions, one after another after another. about the Isreal-Palestine conflict, about college dorms, about college apartments, about the roman empire, about soccer (I know nothing about soccer)... each question made me smile inside. it had been many years since I had experienced the joy of being around uninhibited curiosity, I had forgotten how good it felt. (at the same time, I was slightly saddened too because it had been many months since I had had time for a long conversation.) of course I asked him some questions too, and reminded him that my answers are merely opinions. I wanted to sit there and talk until he had no questions left for the time being. after about 2 hours he ended the conversation as abruptly as he had started it. he stood up and said, "ok, good night” and went up to bed.

3 more historic establishments closing down in Barcelona

2014-10-17T23:16:00.003-04:00

Three more emblematic "mom-n-pop" stores that have formed part of Barcelona's everyday fabric since the 19th century are closing down because the owners of the properties have increased their rent prices to capitalize on mass tourism. Previously, historic establishments had been protected from dramatic rent increases by a law (Ley Boyer), but the law expired this year. In spite of locals' demand to renew the law, the government refused. No respect for history, community, or democracy. That's how neoliberalism (our current economic system) has been working. (But it doesn't have to be that way.)
"Some of the tourists who enjoyed shopping in stores like these told me [the shop-owner], "In our countries we don't have stores like this anymore."

http://www.elperiodico.com/es/noticias/barcelona/tres-tiendas-iconicas-del-centro-anuncian-adios-unisono-ante-inasumible-aumento-del-alquiler-3594248

2014-10-17T23:00:00.002-04:00

Stopped at an intersection today in Philadelphia, I spotted these confetti style flag banner things blowing in the wind at a car dealership on the corner of Chestnut and 48th and I immediately had a flashback of being a kid staring out the backseat window of our brown station-wagon at the same exact scene, but in Detroit, MI, on one of those wide "mile roads", where the car dealerships were streamed with these flag banner things (do they have a name?). They haven´t changed in 30 years.

acrobatic ikebana

2014-10-06T23:00:00.000-04:00

ikebana - flower art
or original acrobatics + domestic design
artist Yuji Ueno said
“nature defying gravity = life”
from today in the spectacular Sawyer library, Williams College

windows that don't open

2014-09-12T10:44:00.001-04:00

the windows in the buildings that house big box and multinational stores never open. (Walmart, Starbucks, McDonalds, Panera, malls...) when these companies appropriate historic buildings (which have windows), they replace the original windows with ones that don't open. the artificial climatization in the big box/multinational buildings can feel very uncomfortable, usually stuffy or overly drying. a chemical, plastic, perfume, air freshners, or burnt coffee or paninis smell swirls aimlessly. there is no fresh air or connection with nature or anything natural. the windows don't open because the company authorities don't want legal trouble which could amount to a relatively small economic loss, i.e. an employee or customer throwing her/himself or her/his boss from a window.

Nana Visits the City by Lauren Castillo

2014-09-06T17:03:00.001-04:00

Narratives for children are so preachy, aren't they? This one is preachy too, but I think the narrative and illustrations are uplifting. A young boy or girl, who dislikes the city, goes to NY to visit his/her Nana. s/he says the city is scary, dirty, noisy. s/he can't sleep. one night Nana knits him a red cape and says ... (I can't remember now), but the girl/boy feels brave in the red cape and it enables him/her to overcome his/her fears and to see the city--the city as social differences--in a new and empathetic light.
...Now, if the anti-city girl/boy at the beginning of the story is a metaphor for planetary suburbia, neoliberal urbanism, gated communities...etc., then what would the transformative red cape symbolize...? I've got to find this red cape!

short intro to the innovative politics currently stirring in Spain "Fighting the New Fascism"

2014-09-05T18:40:00.000-04:00

For those teaching or interested in contemporary culture of Spain, here is a useful, short intro in English to the innovative political practices that are emerging. I like that it includes the historical and international connections with Latin America and Europe. These could be carried over to the US as well.

A couple passages dense with ideas:

"What do you do when representative democracy has ceased to be representative, but when its institutions are still there, controlling the banks, the political parties, the media, international relations, the world of money, the universities? What we learned from Latin America is that there is only one way to break through the gridlock of dysfunctional institutions: appealing directly to the people. We needed tools that would allow Spaniards to organize their discontent and turn it into political energy."

"The neoliberal model has been so successful because it has convinced us that there is no alternative. And it has been able to do so because we have delegated politics to the politicians."

"The neoliberal model has worked very hard to wipe out history and turn it into a kind of decaﬀeinated theme park. It has prevented us from connecting with the historical anger and frustration that anticipated our current anger and frustration."

https://www.academia.edu/8197845/_Fighting_the_New_Fascism_Juan_Carlos_Monedero_on_PODEMOS_Spains_New_Political_Force._

I was a pigeon

2014-09-01T17:28:00.001-04:00

and it was great!

A polar bear possesses extraordinary discipline.

2014-07-26T00:43:00.000-04:00

to be there

2014-07-08T20:18:00.002-04:00

"While it is true that people leave home for a rational reason, in many situations the real reason for choosing public space is simply to be there..."
J. Gehl, 1966

Iniciativas ciudadanas - pdf

2014-07-03T20:59:00.003-04:00

Impresionante. La memoria completa sobre las iniciativas e intervenciones ciudadanas, virtuales y físicas, para el empoderamiento urbano. En pdf, publicada por VIC y La Casa Encendida. Se enfoca mayormente en las intervenciones en Madrid en los últimos años. Con fines democráticos, podría servir como prototipo para participación ciudadana en cualquier ciudad.

http://viveroiniciativasciudadanas.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/VIC-Memoria-6ciudades-BUENAFINAL-140617.pdf

bubble come together

2014-07-02T21:11:00.002-04:00

In the middle of a severely segregated city (economically and racially)--NEWARK, NJ--one can find Intrinsic Cafe, a bubble tea shop, that is working its unifying magic across social differences. I've come across this bubble-come-together phenomenon in many cities.
Gov't officials and college cafeteria administrators should re-think their intercultural programs.
Future academic paper "Deconstructing Neo-landscapes and Post-transcendence in a Bubble Tea Society."

Guanyem/Ganamos Barcelona

2014-06-27T19:31:00.000-04:00

www.guanyembarcelona.cat

Han empezado a organizarse --> potencial a raiz de la ciudad/anía

Imaginados una Barcelona menos turística y más INCLUSIVA.

Forn de Teatre Pa' Tothom - Raval

2014-06-18T08:30:00.000-04:00

On June 13, 2014 teenagers in the neighborhood theatre group "Forn De Teatre Pa'tothom" presented an in-situ skit at the #FemPlaça event about police harassment of immigrants in the Raval, Barcelona.

(In Spanish and a little bit of Catalan.)

#FemPlaça #HagamosPlaza #Let'sMaketheSquare

2014-06-13T17:26:00.004-04:00

here I document a very special event called #FemPlaça #HagamosPlaza #LetsMaketheSquare. the event is special, or rare, for many reasons. here are a couple:

1) it took place in the Plaza Salvador Seguí in the historic Raval neighborhood of Barcelona--Barcelona's most socially diverse neighborhood where many lower-income immigrants and elders live, where prostitutes work, and where police are always watching like hawks. over the last 3 decades the neighborhood has suffered much abuse, speculation, and gentrification. the local gov’t has allowed real estate and construction companies, architects, (multi)national investors to demolish around half of the neighborhood's historic buildings (most dating from the 18th century), their inhabitants and businesses are displaced. why? in order to create apartments, hotels, and shops for tourists. large neighborhood associations have tried to stop this bestial force, but they have been ignored, bullied, and in some cases received death threats. there’s been no stop, no limit, to the destructive tourist speculation. most tourists don’t know about this.

2) public space in Barcelona and most global cities has become extremely regulated, monitored, privatized -- video cameras, controlling urban furniture, police force are ubiquitous and usually inconspicuous. nowadays, before one can carry out harmless activities (such as singing, dancing, resting, meeting in a large group…) in public, the local gov't must give their stamp of approval (because they want to ensure a smooth image and space for the tourist industry). #FemPlaça #HacerPlaza #MakingtheSquare comes from the idea that humans should be able to "be" comfortably in the public space (that they pay for with their taxes) without asking for permission and without being bombarded by an atmosphere that pressures you to spend your money or look at a restaurant menu. at #FemPlaza #HagamosPlaza #LetsMaketheSquare spontaneity played it’s part in enabling all sorts of creative activities (i.e. at one point the kids decided they wanted to paint, later a theatre group appeared and did a skit…).

3) given this surveillance situation, public space in Barcelona (and most global cities) is increasingly “zoned" spatially and segregated socially. us humans (and our spatial needs and desires) come in many ethnic, economic, linguistic, gender, ideological colors…etc. but global downtowns are now surrounded by a new mural, and murals within murals, and in the residential zone they say if you can’t afford $2000/month in rent—stay out! and if the food zone they say: if you can’t pay $20 for a sandwich, stay out! now take a good look at these photos. you’ll see that many different type of activities were occurring simultaneously at #FemPlaça #HacerPlaza #MakingtheSquare (sitting, chatting, singing, eating, drawing, playing…). also, the event encouraged human differences to come together. usually cultural events are organized by a specific institution (a university, the government, a church…), a corporation or bank, or an identity group or club to bring together similar-minded humans. ("separation perfected" Debord called contemporary life.) #FemPlaça #HacerPlaza #MakingtheSquare wanted to advocate public space as an inclusive space so, for this event, anyone could organize activities and participate, regardless of their personal situation. this seems so obvious and normal, right? yet when residents passed by they were like cats checking out a new space--they slowed down, stayed to one side and raised their eyebrows. their first instinct was that: a private event was occurring. we had to make an effort to let strangers know that: hey, this might sound crazy, but this is actually, really, public! you are welcome here! come and enjoy your public space, have some food and drink or chalk or whatever you like!

Plaza Rubió i Lluch

2014-06-06T17:42:00.001-04:00

How many different activities can you spot?

Esta es una plaza, Dr. Forquet 24, Madrid

2014-05-30T16:50:00.002-04:00

This is a rare space. Surrounded by tightly regulated space of very high economic value, this "plaza" doesn't cost anything to use, it can be used by any human being (regardless of how much money you have, your race, ideology, gender...etc.), anyone can take care of it, and there are no video cameras or advertisement. One can do pretty much anything they want here.
How long will it last?

MediaLab in Madrid (a public-private entity) has provided the resources to try to legally keep this espacio autogestionado in the hands of the public. A group of advocates is trying to translate/articulate the importance of the space in written legal jargon in order to gain official approval from the Ayuntamiento (gov't of Madrid) to secure the space.
A difficulty, a wonderful one, that we have had thus far in trying to conceptualize the space within the current legal structure, is that it it doesn't fit into traditional legal jargon or categories. It's not owned by any person or group of people. It's not a garden or a plaza, not a park or a playground; it is a mixture of these places and much more. Those who have been informally maintaining the space don't want to define it as a definition would exclude future possibilities.

More info: http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/videos/la-aventura-del-saber/aventura-del-saber-esta-plaza/2572375/

To be continued...

Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins

2014-04-03T22:10:00.002-04:00

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light

like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room

and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski

across the surface of a poem

waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope

and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means.

"they’re never too old for a revolution"

2014-03-24T23:21:00.002-04:00

Seniors in Spain ("yayoflautas") take action against budget cuts.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/nov/8/in-spain-theyre-never-too-old-for-a-revolution-sen/

Carta por la democracia

2014-03-05T22:13:00.002-05:00

con ilustraciones de Miguel Brieva: http://blogs.traficantes.net/wp-content/blogs.dir/9/files/2014/03/Carta_por_la_Democracia_1pag.pdf

pedestrian space in Copenhagen

2014-02-28T09:59:00.003-05:00

When space is designed for the multi-uses of everyone:

August 2013, at one of Tokyo's 200 Denny's

2014-01-22T09:35:00.000-05:00

re-imagining this scene from several years ago, makes me smile. I was at a Denny's in Tokyo, open all night, I spent a lot of time there because I needed to study and there wasn't enough space in our tiny apartment. (Murakami portrayed the night-time Denny's in his novel After Dark + no doubt it influenced me). (Very different from the Denny's in the US, at the Japanese Denny's the food portions are very small, no fried food smell, the floor is linoleum instead of carpet...)
--------------
the adults who come into this sparkling clean restaurant at midnight, or 1 or 2 or 3am

when most people are in bed
most come in individually, slowly, dressed nicely. occassionally a young couple comes in
with the exception of the young couples, everyone disperses themselves out over the large restaurant ("personal space")
they sit in the floral-patterned plastic-covered booths that are divided by sheets of glass. (huge booths that seem out of place in such a condensed city)
shortly after they sit down they look at the very large illustrated menu and press the plastic brown buzzer-bell
ding-dong
a sleepy-faced waiter/waitress, wearing a brown apron, quickly shuffles over and bows
they all order something similar: something small and inexpensive--an orange juice, a lemonade, a green tea, a red-bean sundae. (This purchase allows them to sit at the booth for as long as they want.)
they consume their drink/ice cream very slowly;
most of them stay sitting there for hours after they've finished eating/drinking, there's no hurry
some quietly get up to use the bathroom
some cross their arms on the table and fall asleep
others stare ahead at their cell phone
the couples, sitting in front of one another with good posture, talk quietly, almost whispering
a middle-aged woman sitting alone with a long face. I wonder if she had an argument with a special person...
and there are a few like me who are typing on their laptop, waiting for the sleepy feeling, in order to walk home

Soleida Ríos

2014-01-21T15:44:00.004-05:00

In La Havana we were lucky to meet and spend time with the Cuban poet Soleida Ríos. Soleida seemed to me to be a generous, transparent, and spiritual person. Her personality is light, it floats. We talked with her for several hours over a meal and a walk down Havana's quiet Avenida de los Presidentes. One thing she said to us that stuck in my head was: “Communism is good for me in particular because I´m terrible with money, this way I don´t have to think or worry about money.”
We are holding guayava fruits, which were REALLY delicious.

I found this video of Soleida and her apartment in La Havana Vieja on Youtube. I think all of us regret not having enough time to accept her invitation to experience her apartment (which you can see in this video below).

Her poems are in books and also dispersed over the internet. Here are a couple that have been translated to English: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/rios/roto.html

creativity and resistance

2013-12-22T10:05:00.004-05:00

In lieu of Spain´s increasingly violent police force and recent Security Law (Ley de Seguridad Ciudadana):

Spanish: http://www.eldiario.es/interferencias/Doce-inspiradoras-Ley-Seguridad-Ciudadana_6_204439558.html

English: http://guerrillatranslation.com/2014/01/07/12-inspired-actions-to-outsmart-repressive-situations-and-laws/

CocoRoom Winter Interior

2013-12-21T20:49:00.000-05:00

My sister was recently at this non-profit art collective, CocoRoom, in Osaka. I loved these two photos.

Chilly and mesmerizing.
http://www.cocoroom.org/

Cultures of Anyone (and everyone)

2013-12-19T15:14:00.002-05:00

Luis Moreno Caballud's insightful recap on Spain's current economic crisis and political resistance (15M, virtual communities...). In English.

http://culturasdecualquiera.wordpress.com/2013/10/21/cultures-of-anyone-the-spanish-indignado-movement-and-its-contexts/

2013-11-10T19:38:00.002-05:00

"hay charcos con ranas donde había charcos con ratas. Con sólo cambiar una letra puede transformarse el mundo..."
-- Javier P. Andújar

autumn sundown play

2013-11-10T19:27:00.001-05:00

5 questions to ask (students)

2013-11-04T20:42:00.002-05:00

1. What do you think?

2. Why do you think that?

3. How do you know this?

4. Can you tell me more?

5. What questions do you still have?

for the complete article: http://www.edutopia.org/blog/five-powerful-questions-teachers-ask-students-rebecca-alber

high ed diagram

2013-11-01T20:03:00.004-04:00

In this diagram I was trying to illustrate a massive structure--the higher education system in the “global north” or at least the United States. (If you click on it, you can see it larger.) Of course there will be many exceptions to this structure, but I am interested in what it might look like in the general view.

Hafu - mixed-race realities in Japan

2013-10-22T09:18:00.002-04:00

A socially-important documentary about half-
Japanese humans (mainly in Tokyo).
trailer: http://youtu.be/6j_wQQZY-OE
official website: http://hafufilm.com/en

versión cómic de PICNIC - Fernando Arrabal, dibujada por Jaime Asensi

2013-10-17T19:57:00.001-04:00

Interpretación visual de la obra de teatro de Arrabal.
Difícil de encontrar. Se puede bajar AQUÍ en pdf, en color.
(Este cómic podría dialogar bien con la obra de teatro Esquadra hacia la muerte de Alonso Sastre.)
Temas: guerra, violencia, existencialismo, el absurdo, la humanidad, compañerismo, universalismo...

today in West Chester, PA

2013-09-14T15:12:00.000-04:00

Today for the first time in my life I picked up a hitchhiker. Maybe it was because he was dressed like my father. He looked to be around 75-80.
Slowly driving past him I remembered my sister’s 2.5-day love celebration (aka wedding, a couple weeks ago) and how, afterwards, I told myself I would try to be more generous to the realm outside my workplace. I also thought about David Sedaris’s, Roald Dahl’s and Jack Kerouac’s hitchhiking stories. (Now I wonder how could I have thought of all those things in about 10 seconds?)
I slowed down the car and parked the right side of the car on the sidewalk.
Probably he didn’t have a gun and was too weak to hurt me.
I put on my tough face, walked over to him, and asked him what was wrong?
He smelled like soap and was happy to see me.
He told me that he had a contact stuck in his eye and needed a ride to ER.
I asked him why don’t you take a taxi?
He told me because he didn’t have enough money and that the hospital was only 2 miles up the road.
I tried to remain skeptical. He pointed to his left eye. I looked at it and could see a blue lens in the upper corner.
For some reason I asked him if I could try to remove it.
He asked me if I was a nurse?
I told him no, but that I was frequently removing my own contacts.

The contact was in fact really glued to his eye, so I drove him to ER.

The end.

Moral of the story: hitchhikers always make for interesting stories. And West Chester, PA needs better public transportation.

whimsical sounds, John Zorn

2013-09-07T21:37:00.001-04:00

Thanks to NPR I discovered the music of John Zorn last week.

Here is a Conqueror Worm from his new album Dreamachines.

Don't sit here! [part 1]

2013-08-05T11:03:00.000-04:00

Public urban spaces can be used for an infinite amount of creative personal and collective activities.
//
A tiny wealthy minority is increasingly controlling public areas of high consumption (with surveillance cameras, police, and the design of such space...).
//
Our taxes and presence in the city pays for our public spaces. But benches and places to sit and lay down are disappearing from public space, and instead, being replaced with private outdoor café/restaurant seating and keep-moving!-urban-furniture.
//
When we think of physical/material spaces that keep us out, we tend to think fences, gates, doors, walls... But there are many more inconspicuous examples of these everyday barriers, and they dictate what we do, what we know, and what we experience in the city, often without us evening knowing it!
//
Here are some examples. If you want to sit or lay in these places in Barcelona, you will need to bring a heavy plank of wood with you, or a chair.

ay/ouch for living beings such as:

elders

people who have a sore, injured, or tired body part and need to rest or stretch

women who need to breastfeed

people who need to change a baby´s diaper

people who love yoga

kids who want to make snow angles

lovers

people who don´t have a place to sleep or want to sleep outside

clumsy people who trip a lot

tired horses, bears, or elephants

people who suddenly suffer some kind of attack

who/what else?

(from 2012-16):

Browsing through old photographs from my dissertation, I came across these SITuations from 2004-2008:

From Jacques Rancière:
--> "Move along! There is nothing to see here!" The police says that there is nothing to see on a road, that there is nothing to do but move along. It asserts that the space of circulating is nothing other than the space of circulation. Politics, in contrast, consists in transforming this space of 'moving-along' into a space for the appearance of a subject: i.e., the people, the workers, the citizens: It consists in refiguring the space, of what there is to do there, what is to be seen or named therein. It is the established litigation of the perceptible… (“Ten Theses”, #8)

smack!

2013-08-01T11:57:00.000-04:00

"Chal-SSAK!" = “smack" in Korean. I have seen so many dark-humor chal-ssaks! in recent Korean films. Here´s one from Kim Ki-duk´s Pieta (2012)--a tough movie to watch.

things around the Fontclara house (mini video)

2013-07-12T09:53:00.001-04:00

Last Sunday I had the luck of spending the day at an old farmhouse in the tiny historic town of Fontclara (~ 20 inhabitants, near Gerona). I finally had some free time, so I decided to record some sounds and scenes from around the house with an SLR camera. later I put the clips together in iMovie.

Given our shrinking attention span, I tried to keep it as short as possible, it's 2 mins long.
Maybe it can transmit some good feeling.

https://vimeo.com/70180569

2013-06-25T19:01:00.002-04:00

public, free, always
night time activities
in the plaza
Plaça del Diamant, Barcelona

Photo by Maria Van Liew.

Partial list of new ingredients the Moors gradually introduced to the West via Spain (8th-15th centuries)

2013-06-22T07:21:00.001-04:00

- Grains: Short-grained rice, hard wheat for bread and pasta (distinct from soft-wheat introduced by the Romans), millet, spelt and sorghum (a cereal grass)

- Fresh and dried fruits and nuts, rhizomes and tubers: Lemons, limes, bitter oranges for medicinal and liturgical uses, dates (Iraq), pomegranates, apricots, peaches, bananas, honeydew melons (Egypt), watermelons (N. Africa), coconuts, figs, quince, new varieties of grapes, raisins, currants, and mangoes

- Condiments: murrī (A thick soy sauce concoction made and fermented, rotten barley, etc. outdoors and taking several months to produce.)

- Nuts: Almonds, pistachios, pine nuts, walnuts and chestnuts

- Sweeteners: Sugar cane (India and Persia) and its refinement into fine white sugar, new bee varieties

- Herbs and Spices: Saffron, cinnamon (bark and ground from India), coriander, nutmeg and cloves (South East Asia), cumin, anise seed, pepper and ginger (India), basil, mint, jasmine, and tamarind. Importation of gum mastic, asafetida and other gums and saps as flavoring, mint, parsley cilantro and sage.

- Vegetables and Tubers: Gourds, eggplant, artichoke, carrot, zucchini, asparagus, leeks, spinach, and new hybrids of less bitter cabbage, taro, and cucumbers

- Beverages: Coffee, coconut milk, sharbat (A category of drinks called 'snow drinks' made with fruit juice and sugar and chilled with either snow or ice.)

-- Santich. 1995. p.25-26.; Freeman. 2007. p. 135, by James Moore

Barcelona ♥ Pickpocket

2013-06-18T07:07:00.001-04:00

Yesterday I posted this:

now that 70% of public and private space in the historic quarter Barcelona has been occupied by tourists, the tourists should come together to claim their right to the city. They could hang multilingual banners from their temporary apartment balconies across the historic neighborhoods that state in big letters:

PLEASE DON'T PICKPOCKET US!

(# saw another female tourist crying today)

Today my friend Eva Megias responded with a clever photo montage:

2013-06-16T16:19:00.002-04:00

from above
a completely different city
(looking north over the Barri Gòtic)

Ens toca conference / independent inclusive art groups

2013-06-15T13:09:00.000-04:00

http://rpstceng.ateneusantboia.net/about-up-to-us/

Trying to make sense after a day full of inspiring talks and presentations by dozens of European independent "gestión cultural" (cultural management) organizations. That is-- non-profit organizations that work directly with local communities (everyone, regardless of identity or citizenship) in order to create art and social awareness projects. I was really amazed with many of their projects, their efforts to be INCLUSIVE, and also the collective and economic situations that enabled them to be carried out. I asked a ton of questions and found out some things--

- many of the groups are financed by a big mix of sources-- donations, municipal subsidies, the European Union/Commission, cash earned during local festivals (from selling drinks, t-shirts...etc.)
- all of the groups had to fight very hard (writing letters, holding protests...) against local gov´t and corporate powers in order to claim a space as their own (i.e. to have a cultural center)
- all the groups relied on both a physical and virtual (internet) space
- all of the groups took several years to establish themselves and flourish, projects didn´t have a quick turn-around
- about half of the the workers I met are volunteers, the other half earn a modest salary and are on renewable year-long contracts
- most of the projects, even though they prioritized getting locals involved, they were not strictly local, rather they involved workers/volunteers/networks/funding in/with other European countries. the fluidity between the European borders was pretty impressive (and maybe a new phenomenon)
- many of the paid workers studied a BA or MA degree in something related to cultural arts

Questions I still have -- does this career or these opportunities in gestión cultural exist in the US? They asked me about the US situation and I could only think of opportunities like this that are sponsored by universities, religious, or political-lobbying groups. I guessed that open groups like this may exist in some progressive urban neighborhoods i.e. on the East or West coasts...but I´d have to research it, I don´t know.

If jobs in gestión cultural exist in the US, then it would be a new direction to send our students when they ask us "what can I do with a degree in liberal arts?" (I get this question weekly.) But... I think this sector doesn´t really exist in the US. Any comments?

primeros días, observaciones downtown Barcelona: mid-June 2013 compared with December 2011

2013-06-14T14:40:00.001-04:00

Now:

- more Catalán flags hanging from balconies
- more young foreigners in Gracia (20-30 age group)
- more international consumption in Gracia (new Japanese shops and restaurants, lindy hop dance studio, English language 2nd hand bookstore...)
- new jamón serrano store on upper Rambla
- three new American-style diners (2 in the left Eixample, 1 in the Born)
- a gourmet cookie bakery in the Born
- vending machines that sell electronics in the metro, and in the Lesseps metro station they have installed a massive (like 12 feet by 10 feet) wall-size vending machine that sells refrigerated foods and drinks (Lesseps is the stop where tourists get off for Park Guell)
- hot dog stand on the Ramblas (near Carrefour)
- more Asian presence, both locals and tourists
- U of Barcelona campuses now boast American style paraphernalia stores
- 4 or 5 new tattoo parlors (Gothic and Gracia neighborhoods)
- more Arabic tourists (from the language I hear and the women's hiyab)
- something weird-- for over a decade I'm used to Catalan-speaking shop-owners in Barcelona to treat me coldly or to not treat me at all, but now in the touristy areas several of them, upon entering a shop, several of them have greeted me with a forced fast "hola" (perhaps there has been some tourist district customer service training or something)
- dozens of chatarreros/as, sifting through the trash bins, filling large grocery store carts (Prof. McDonough says chataerros take their chatarra to Badalona where they can cash it in)
- not as easy to distinguish locals from tourists anymore
- and (the most surprising which checks off the last requirement for Barcelona to enter the club of globalized cities) two new bubble tea joints in the tourist Gothic neighborhood (on C/ Avinyó) and in the Raval near the Ramblas (on C/ Tallers)
- as of July 18, 2013 there is now an announcement that plays in the metro, in a variety of languages, that warns tourists about pickpockets

Most point to globalization, increasingly similar cultural package offered in other global cities (homogenization), more "typical Spanish" consumption opportunities for tourists, cultural influence from US and Asia...

tourism won't save anything

2013-06-13T03:16:00.000-04:00

Solving "la crisis" by increasing an already excessive tourist sector?
8 million tourists a year in a neighborhood where only 104,000 locals remain.
To make room for more tourism, CiU and PP have approved of a plan to demolish 380 previously "protected" historic buildings (and their inhabitants and local communities).

http://www.lavanguardia.com/local/barcelona/20130610/54375862394/rescatar-barcelona-avalancha-turistica.html

2013-05-29T21:32:00.000-04:00

public (not sponsored by an institution) art in Barcelona
petition to engage the local government in the conversation

CARbon

2013-05-25T05:01:00.003-04:00

Yesterday I came across this bike lot in Tokyo; it was next to a large apartment or condo complex.

The convenient bike lot reminded me of a recent disappointment with the apartment complex where I live, in a town outside Philadelphia. When I asked the complex owners where one parks their bikes I was told “bikes are not permitted around the building, they must be carried up to one’s own apartment.” My apartment is too small to comfortably fit a bike (and I don’t feel like carrying it up 3 flights of stairs)…luckily there is a bike rack 1/2 mile down the road in front of a college dorm that pertains to a public university, so I can legally park my bike there.

I guess it sounds naive, but I wish every town and suburb in the United States could have a convenient proportion of these bike lots. (Car reliance is predominately a problem in the United States.) Less driving would imply a lot of social improvements — for health and well-being, for the environment, for culture, for sustainability, for families, for saving time and money, for interacting with differences, for reducing bloody wars…etc.

This ties in with a book I just started reading called Walkable City by Jeff Speck. Here's a passage from it (taken from David Owen's Green Metropolis) that recaps one of the main ideas thus far -- it's not one car that's harmful, rather the entire national (American) individualistic lifestyle of relying on an automobile everyday. This triggers major local and global harms (much of which we don't see because we have distanced ourselves from the harm we produce).

“The real problem with cars is not that they don’t get enough miles per gallon; it’s that they make it too easy for people to spread out, encouraging forms of development that inherently wasteful and damaging… The critical energy drain in a typical American suburb is not the Hummer in the driveway; it’s everything else the Hummer makes possible — the oversized houses and irrigated yards, the network of new feeder roads and residential streets, the costly and inefficient outward expansion of the power grid, the duplicated stores and schools, the two-hour commutes.”

There is a very positive trend, however—according to their research, the younger generation in the United States (the “millennials”) is moving into the cities, where they can use their legs, bikes, and public transport.

Update: found this wonderful bike parking structure in Kyoto:

home smell

2013-05-21T20:07:00.002-04:00

Arriving in a quiet Tokyo neighborhood at night
it rained a couple days ago
soft dry warm unscented smell of
clean in the apartment

as home as it gets for me.

2013-04-28T21:28:00.001-04:00

NYTimes article on the growing economic division between upper and lower income students in U.S. universities.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/27/no-rich-child-left-behind/

We haven't progressed much from Bourdieu's 1971 reality in “Unequal Education and the Reproduction of the Social Division of Labor.”

2013-04-25T22:42:00.004-04:00

Some photos I took last summer in Fiji.

2013-04-05T19:26:00.000-04:00

Frog is imagining Toad has already made the transpacific trip to the tiny snowed-in town where he obtained a position as a literature teacher for gifted tadpoles. Even though the move won't really happen until Autumn, in Frog’s imprudent mind Toad is already there—in a modest apartment, already living his mundane life as a literature teacher. He is serving himself a bowl of soup and rice for dinner. Puts them on a tray and takes them into a living room where he turns on the television, slowly eats, and stares at the glass screen. He will watch the television for one half hour or so, until his eyes start to roll to the side. Then Toad will get up, carry the tray to the kitchen, and without washing the dishes or going to the toilet, he will immediately fall into bed. And with closed eyes Toad will sluggishly tuck a thick down blanket around him and disappear into a sound sleep. At 6:00 his alarm clock will sound (really a very plain and boring alarm clock, nothing descriptive about it). Then he will prepare for another day at the school.

Frog thinks Toad is already there, in the same latitude, sharing a parallel evening and similar climate. Frog imagines, “if I were to get into the car right now, and start driving, I could arrive at Toad’s apartment at 4am!...Although that might startle Toad…”

But it won’t, because, as I mentioned, Toad is not there yet. (And also, frogs can’t drive.)

And so I told Frog, “be patient, my friend, Autumn will come soon.”

2013-02-09T00:04:00.000-05:00

Like some planet out there that hasn’t been discovered yet.
Just waiting there
in space,
with all its feelings,
looking out.

discreet charm of the Tokyo Jazz café

2013-01-24T23:04:00.001-05:00

Arthur Fowler, Noriko Shigehara, and others (whose name I don´t know) play at the tiny Checkerboard Jazz Bar (Asagaya, Tokyo).

I had read about the mythical, sophisticated music place several times in H. Murakami´s work: the jazz bar/café in Tokyo. I had imagined hundreds of CDs and records of old jazz bands carefully stacked by aficionados in tight wooden squares and rectangles along walls in a dark, timeless bar. Last Friday I experienced it in non-fiction: sitting knees-to-back, shoulder-to-wall on little stools. Maybe in total 12 stools, 12 respectful listeners. The place must have been about 6 by 14 feet. One couldn´t move (it was tricky to take this photo). But a lack of space did not create a repressive feeling, quite the opposite, it seemed not to matter who you were or who you sitting next to, I lost track of time and felt a cozy, melting exception, for which I was very grateful.

/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\

Jazz café recommendations from Arthur san (hard to find in English!)

Some of Tokyo’s top jazz players play at the Big River, as well as a range of other folks, including us. The “Master” there is fairly good at English and is a good person. It’s about as small as the Checkerboard, but a more “serious jazz” atmosphere. Some of the jazz fans and musicians here like it exactly because when the music is on (30-minute sets), there’s no talking or ordering, so it’s all about watching very good players from the front row. Big River:
http://www.bigjazzriver.com/st/nd.html

This little place is around the corner and down the block on the street that runs along-side the Higashi-Nakano station. I haven’t gone in yet. Thelonious:
http://www.tokyojazzsite.com/content/thelonious

Here’s a link to another place that is highly regarded in the jazz world of Tokyo. I’ve only been there once. Meg:
http://tokyojazzsite.com/content/meg

And this place, right up the street from Takadanobaba station is really small! Intro:
http://tokyojazzsite.com/content/intro

Oh, and here’s one other place, just past Meiji-doori on Waseda-doori. It’s on the second floor. I’ve walked by it many times, but haven’t paid the fees to see a show there yet. Sunny Side:
http://www.sunny-side.jp/index.html

Last Friday at Sunny Side Jazz Café it was open mic night:

"likeaswitchboard"

2013-01-10T06:21:00.001-05:00

“Don’tworry. Youreallyarepartofhere, really. Alwayshavebeen, always willbe. Itallstartshere, itallendshere. Thisisyourplace. It’stheknot. It’stiedtoeverything.”

“Everything?”

“Everything. Thingsyoulost. Thingsyou’regonnalose. Everything. Here’swhereitalltiestogether.”

— Dance Dance Dance, Haruki Murakami, p.83

TV documentary in English: Spain´s current economic crisis

2012-12-19T09:43:00.002-05:00

2012-11-25T18:38:00.002-05:00

leaf patina paradise in Queen Village, Philadelphia

new painting by Saiko Shiiki

2012-09-15T18:51:00.005-04:00

From the talented Shiiki family comes Saiko san's new painting--capturing the magic of "autumn foliage".

I really like the colors, innocence, and two-dimensionality of this one.

Click once to see it larger.

For more paintings, see her blog.

Nalauwaki Village, Waya Island

2012-09-10T08:58:00.002-04:00

Coming soon, I want to write about my experience with the warm-hearted Yabayaba family on the miniature village of Nalauwaki on the tiny island of Waya, Fiji, South Pacific. One of the most educational and "real" experiences of my life.

...

Tabiwaya, Rebeka, Semaema, and Naomi. July 2012.

View Larger Map

material days

2012-08-11T00:46:00.000-04:00

An attempt to write something. Again in a geo-transition period (Grinnell-New Zealand in 2009; New Zealand-West Chester 2012), during which my mind becomes mush. Only the most basic words float in the bowl.

I just watched the film Tony Takitani, based on H. Murakami´s short story of the same title. The general plot centers around the loneliness of a man and the relationship with his late wife who was obsessed with buying expensive clothes. The story resonates with what I´ve been experiencing these days. I have spent $______ (a very large amount) in less than a week. I have never ever spent money like this before nor have I ever had the desire to. Plane tickets, apartment deposit and first month rent, new laptop, new furniture… Having to leave so much behind in New Zealand has meant having to re-buy so many things, again. A waste of time? (Not in the long run.) While I can feel a moment of excitement at purchasing something new, or finding some interesting design or color, overall, having to consume so much (especially at massive corps like IKEA and Bed Bath and Beyond) leaves me with a very empty feeling, sometimes a guilty feeling. I suppose I could enjoy it more if I was sharing the shopping. But, I´m shopping alone and placing the objects in a single apartment where they will live only with me. Hopefully I will have company at some time. “So-and-so, I´d like you to meet Volmar Swivel Chair.”

What really matters? It´s all so relative; writing this will make no difference whatsoever. I just like to see the font of the published blog entry.

Lautoka

2012-07-28T19:28:00.001-04:00

A reality of Fiji that receives little attention.

Lautoka, a multicultural city 30 minutes north of Nadi.

Photos taken July 24-26, 2012.
To see the video/photos larger, click here to be taken to youtube.

last hour in Dunedin, New Zealand

2012-07-28T16:44:00.000-04:00

My last hour in Dunedin, New Zealand. I wanted to get the Flaming Lips version of this song because it’s more atmospherical and fantastical with a harp background, but I couldn’t find a copy anywhere!

interviews

2012-07-17T05:56:00.002-04:00

13 memorable interviews for the Kiwi Accents Project.

Here´s a sneak preview.

Ode to Dunedin

2012-07-12T09:08:00.000-04:00

I sit and sit
and live the slow footsteps
thin-soled shoes
plop plop
new tramping boots
crunch crunch
to the right of me --
ingrained splatter and soft green fuzz
to the left --
broken bottle brushed into the side of an old building
the quiet dampness of last night's sprinkle
the sun will come and warm me up
I wish it wouldn't be so shy!

the most beautiful room I ever saw

2012-06-17T11:31:00.000-04:00

The most mesmerizing architecture I ever experienced. An old hotel converted into a ryokan. Long corridors of small wooden rooms that look over a narrow river covered in lofty trees, each room differently hand-designed.

"Soon her eye fell on a little glass box that was lying under the table: she opened it, and found in it a very small cake, on which the words `EAT ME' were beautifully marked in currants. `Well, I'll eat it,' said Alice, `and if it makes me grow larger, I can reach the key; and if it makes me grow smaller, I can creep under the door; so either way I'll get into the garden, and I don't care which happens!'"

K's House, Ito

yearnings relief

2012-04-26T08:17:00.000-04:00

A polar bear is studing linguistics,
while Megan imagines a polar bear studying linguistics.

Levi´s first steps!

2012-04-21T20:02:00.001-04:00

Akihabeara

2012-04-17T09:22:00.002-04:00

A polar being is going shopping

for a multilingual electronic dictionary.

Waiotapu natural colors

2012-04-12T05:52:00.006-04:00

For more photos, see my alter blog.

Secular Teaching Missions, 1st Republic Spain

2012-03-11T16:57:00.003-04:00

kesa, this morning

2012-02-17T18:07:00.005-05:00

A zillion miles away won´t stop me
from thinking about you this morning with
these particular morning feelings
influenced by last night´s particular dreams
these particular pijamas,
this chocolate breakfast,
and this carpet smell.

Will be repeated on the other side of the world,
about 4 hours later.
But from my memory,
I think you will be in
different and familiar colors,
different and familiar pijamas,
different and familiar breakfast and smells

I remember that
right now you´re sleeping,
but in about 4 hours you will sit up and find yourself in a geographical deja vu.

This doubly uncertain future
won´t stop me
from thinking about you.

food nouns

2012-01-27T09:36:00.004-05:00

two nouns in Japanese that don't exist as single words in English or Spanish:

はごたえ = hagotae = the texture a food item has when you chew it

のどごし = nodogoshi = the feeling when a certain food item goes down your throat

young girl on the metro

2011-12-20T14:16:00.008-05:00

Yesterday on the subway there was a dad and daughter sitting in front of me. The young girl was half smiling half figgity/nervous. I looked up at the dad, and he said to me: "es la primera vez que sube al metro" (it´s her first time on the subway).

microcosm day notes

2011-12-17T06:23:00.035-05:00

[The city] isn’t just a place to live, to shop, to go out and have kids play. It’s a place that implicates how one derives one’s ethics, how one develops a sense of justice, how one learns to talk with and learn from people who are unlike oneself, which is how a human becomes human. (Sennet, “Civitas” 83)

- found new library, Sofia Barat on career Girona where I browsed through 15M related comic book "Revolution Complex" and discovered a stretchy transparent plastic book cover. i liked this. i asked the librarian where one could find this, she was nicer than most local strangers I talk to, she told me "probably in any stationary store"

- I decided i wanted to buy the book because it could be useful for my teaching/research, so I walked towards the Raval neighborhood, towards the CCCB. While I was in the Raval I stopped to tie my shoe and an older woman in approached me, maybe French (from her accent), she was looking for the Facultad de Geografía y Filosofía. I took her there and we chatted

- browsed books at the CCCB and purchased "Revolution Complex" with a 5% discount

- leaving the CCCB, in the Plaza de los Ángeles I saw some pee trickling down the sidewalk. I often see trickling pee, but this time it was more than the usual. my eyes followed it to source. An old thin man with blond and white hair had peed his blue jeans... he stared at me with half-closed eyes and his mouth drooped open...

- I continued forward on Ferlandina street and I passed a young African chatarrero (why define him as African? because I´m 99% sure he was an African immigrant and because his skin color is related to his precarious situation). he had accumulated several junk items in a cart. some will critique my response, but I felt bad. it has to be really shitty to make a living going through garbage. I thought about my money in the bank and how much money I spend on sweets. i turned around, walked back towards him and handed him 10 euros and kept walking. This made me feel elitist, and I don´t like that, but I didn´t know what else to do, i only mention it here because it was a yet another unexpected encounter with a social difference and because the dominating media and knowledge-makers ignore chatarreros, as if they didn't exist.

- islamic pastelería. bought two baklava, one chicken curry roll, and one water.

- changed direction, wanted to get photos of the Forat de la vergonya plaza. Walked towards the back of the Boqueria market. A Murakami moment--I spotted a very interesting fenced off Jardin dels gats on the side of a small plaza (Cat Garden). A bit stinky but colorful and safe playground for stray cats.

- Then I came across some red leaves growing down a building behind the Boqueria. my housemate Joan had previously shown me a picture of these. I was taking a picture of this area when two girls approached me and asked for directions to the Guell Palace. the map was in Korean. I walked with them for about 5 minutes showing them where they needed to go and told them that I liked Korean film and we mentioned a couple titles. They seemed really happy.

- I looked at the sky trying to figure out what time it was. I needed to meet a friend to see a film at 5pm. It usually gets dark at 5:30pm and it still seemed quite light out. So, I headed over towards Forat de la vergonya. along the way I spotted a clock somewhere-- 4:50pm. Shoot! I rushed to the Urquioana metro stop and got on the yellow line, I was going to be late for the movie and I didn't have a way to contact my friend... (notice my difficulty in comparison to others'.)

- After the movie ("Interferencies", it was ok...) I went to my friend´s place. She had a migraine and needed to take some medicine. She also needed to meet her boyfriend´s mother, who is from a far away country. She didn´t want to go because the lady is not that nice. she asked me if I would come along. I said yes. We met her at a coffeeshop and I ate a palmera de chocolate. This woman had suffered and continues to suffer from domestic violence and I could see it in her face. It was hard for me to digest this...

- Nevertheless, we were still hungry so we went to eat a piadina, an italian flat bread grilled sandwich. it was very good.

Forat de la vergonya - Hole of Shame

2011-12-06T09:23:00.006-05:00

dominos, soccer, benches, and a garden.

"forat de la vergonya"´s year-round citizen-sustained garden and free vegetables for all in the middle of a dense hodge podge of buildings dating from 20 to 2000 years ago. this area (actually it´s a large plaza) represents a citizen-based victory after a long fight against speculators. a decade ago the municipal gov´t was going to construct a private parking structure here. a large portion of the area was demolished, citizens evicted, small local businesses shut down, police squashed the protests... but after several ongoing protests, the bulldozers withdrew and the people got their plaza back, but of course it was a mess. since then, the local neighborhood association has cleaned it up and maintained it themselves, but police still circulate the plaza.

More info: http://nevada.ual.es:81/redURBS/BlogURBS/los-agujeros-de-la-memoria-urbana/

my geoslip

2011-11-26T18:07:00.019-05:00

Returning to Barcelona´s streets after a long time away is strangely as easy as mindlessly slipping into an ______[insert old piece of clothing]______.
So much info and mundane responses that had not consciously entered my mind for two years have seamlessly and effortlessly come back to me. for example—
knowing exactly where to look when crossing certain streets, and how to manuever through certain crowded areas,
anticipating street light signals,
reproducing the local way of interacting with strangers (dryly, kind of depressed like),
not giving foul smells a second thought (urine, car exhast, sewer mold),
speaking words that I haven´t said or heard in years (cundir, rentable, parches, despistar, difundir...),
enthusiastically stating a specific preference for a type of bread, cheese or bean that I don´t even recall liking so much (garrafón!)…..
It's as if I have snapped into a different me, a me who has been here in Barcelona all long while the real me has been away.
(Oh this is very 1Q84, parallel realities with glitches.) Yes, some things aren´t registering or matching up and have stopped me in my path. (This is what I expected would happen since the city inevitably would have changed while I was away.) For example, I don´t recognize the new intersection lights, or the red paint on the streets at intersections; I got lost because I got the Ronda de Sant Pau mixed up with la Avenida del Paralelo, and I got turned around in the underground train-metro division at Plaza de Cataluña. Example 4 and example 5

7 minutes of modernist and moving barcelona, captured in 1908

2011-11-20T03:55:00.000-05:00

video here: http://www.europafilmtreasures.eu/PY/245/see-the-film-barcelona_by_tram

small junk mail tactic

2011-10-29T17:20:00.007-04:00

For those living in the US and receiving loads of junkmail, here´s a very easy and non-violent way to protest financial corruption (and even support your local post office).
When our representatives don´t listen, we have to get creative. This is very creative.

the evolution of asking why?

2011-10-22T05:10:00.010-04:00

universal separation

2011-09-18T17:42:00.035-04:00

Re-reading old notes on Henri Lefebvre I came across a passage that seemed so multi-applicable, not just to space, but all objects of analysis across time. Here are a couple lines of it:

"A comparable approach is called for today, an approach which would analyse not things in space, but space itself, with a view to uncovering the social relationship embedded in it. The dominant tendency fragments space and cuts it up into pieces. It enumerates the things, the various objects, that space contains. [. . . ]" (page 90, The Production of Space, 1974)

Someone could say this is naive or obvious because the ideas on social division have been re-worked and re-published over the last 4 decades, but we only have to look around, look at our institutions, the organization of our neighborhoods, our personal work environments, and local ways of political representation to see that the divided conditions Lefebvre assume are overwhelmingly present today, and so his proposal to disclose them is still urgent and worthwhile.

This continuity also evokes the unoriginal and generalized question as to why we have not come very far (this could be measured at least in terms of humans killed per yer) after decades of progressive discourse. I think a main cause lies in the fact that our centers of knowledge and education are still too spatially, geographically and socially isolated, "cut up into pieces." An epitome could be the typical American college campus, separated from the rest of society and the diversity of the nearest city by approximately 30 miles of flat cement and thousands of dollars in tuition fees. In spite of the internet and freer access to information, the reworking and republishing of ideas on social division have ocurred predominantly within these isolated campuses.

The opposite of separation/division would be the lack of any at all, which would be like spatial relativity and chaos. But he's not calling for chaos. I can't prove it right now, but I imagine he's calling for a more public recognition and more democratic dealing with division.

I'll end this post on a related tangent. Lefebvre's passage links me to another spatial and multi-applicable passage I came across the other day in Fernando Arrabal's Carta al General Franco, which was written three years before The Production of Space and reflects on the violence and hatred of the Franco regime:

"España no era sino un cárcel compuesta de pequeñas cárceles que se precipitaban hacia el infierno." (42) ["Spain was a prison composed of little prisons, which precipitated towards hell."]

(I'd be grateful if you could leave feedback because I am currently isolated!)

chapas chungas

2011-09-11T02:09:00.013-04:00

The economic ways of some prostitutes and immigrants, thieves, and pick pockets. Their realities of Barcelona were projected on decorative pins and sold in the local bookstore La Central.
Here you can see the pins foregrounding a colorful Bus Turistic:

The municipal government must have found their content scandalous as it has ordered the removal of these pins from the bookstore.
These pins fulfilled at least a valuable component of the alternative tourist package, and more seriously and lesser known, they add to the pile of proof that the contentious workings of city branding are omnipresent.
A few determine what will and will not be acceptable for public knowledge.
Full article here. The artists have made their pins available for purchase directly from their website here.

Rafa Zumbiría - No Way Home

2011-09-02T06:14:00.003-04:00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrlegumbre/sets/72157622933742475/

ways of dodging memories

2011-08-24T12:12:00.004-04:00

"Cuando las moscas del dolor vienen a perturbar la nostalgia, lo más conveniente es ponerse un libro delante de los ojos. Uno se siente gratificado, colmado de dones impredecibles. Al leer un libro, uno se siente lleno de cosas que no se pueden explicar." (Nuria Amat, Casa de verano)

"When the flies of pain come to disturb nostalgia, the best thing is to put a book in front of your eyes. You feel gratified, loaded with unpredictable gifts. Reading a book, you feel full of things that can’t be explained."

the lives of lambs

2011-08-22T17:28:00.017-04:00

High up in the clouds, J tries to catch a lost lamb.

Eventually, somehow, the owners got news of their lost lamb, they appeared in their truck, caught it by hand, lifted it up (it looked heavy) and dropped in on the other side of the fence. Very Haruki Murakami! And considering what happened the following day, I would like to write a short story later when I have time, of the grotesque genre (but maybe by the time I have time-- the visceral feeling and hence creativity will have died down).

The following day, we headed towards Mount Cook. It was sunny, blue sky, fluffy clouds (looked like lambs?) big brownish-yellow snow-capped mountains all around us. At one point we came across a large flock of lambs that recently had their coats shaved. There must have been about 120 of them. They were running along the highway towards Mount Cook. It was fun to stop the car for a flock of lambs (there´s very little traffic on this highway). When I slowly approached in the car I was able to get a close look at them; and what I saw was so repugnant and stomach-churning that I won´t ruin your day by writing it here or posting the photos. (At least not for now!) Lambs don´t live such a cute pastoral life as many many imagine. I will never be able to think "cute" when i think of lambs anymore. I´ll hint, though, that it wasn´t death, and that the color and texture of the lambs´recently-shaved coats--snow-white, thick and wavy--emitted a tremendous emotional effect, created a sharp color-affective contrast with...the grotesque aspect.

There were two other times when I experienced this feeling. Fictional textual experiences. One was in Michael Haneke´s excellent film Caché, and the other was in one of the best novels ever: Haruki Murakami´s Chronicle of a Wind-Up Bird when a soldier is skinned alive. (...)

May be on my way to becoming a vegetarian.

reforming education with mindful writing and communication

2011-06-01T17:05:00.005-04:00

I highly recommend this documentary:

May 2011 La Puerta del Sol

2011-05-29T01:30:00.007-04:00

More info on the 15-M movement here.

commecial short review Linda Linda Linda

2011-04-29T18:23:00.017-04:00

"Feminism is anti-sexism. [. . . ] We have created no schools founded on feminist [anti-sexist] principles for girls and boys, for women and men. By failing to create a mass-based educational movement to teach everyone about feminism [anti-sexism] we allow mainstream patriarchal mass media to remain the primary place where folks learn about feminism, and most of what they learn is negative." -- bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody

Director Nobuhiro Yamashita, Japan 2005.

Linda Linda Linda relates the endearing and humorous story of a group of four high school girls who put their hearts into performing as a rock band at their high school’s festival.

With talented actresses and a simple storyline, director Nobuhiro Yamashita creates an innocent, tender, and feminist [anti-sexist] reality in which social prejudices, high school cliques, and vanity are nonexistent. It could be considered a “girl power” film or subtly a “gender-bender” one, in the sense that, it is what life, or at least high school, would look like if "girls could be girls."

Driven by friendship and dedication, and undeterred by their imperfect music skills, the four unpretentious girls are determined to perform together as a band. Practicing incessantly and under time pressure, each band member has charm in her own humble way. Bae Doona in particular, the school’s foreign exchange student from Korea and lanky-legged wide-eyed vocalist, overcomes her initial foreign language and singing insecurities to add color to the otherwise quiet and mundane suburban high school. Messy hair, scuffed knees and no make-up--the band surpasses the passive kawaii Japanese school-girl stereotype. Unlike most high school stories in which the girls try to secure a boyfriend, or deal with teenage awkwardness, or win first place or top grades in something, these protagonists put their energy and emotions into simply making a rock band work as a team. A commendable goal, in my opinion.

The film manages to be a "feel good" one without the cheesy Hollywood ending. After you view the it you might have a smile on your face and the songs in your head. And if you're like me, you'll be wishing your high school had been like this one!

しょうがない

2011-04-25T07:16:00.002-04:00

Good night.

haiku?

2011-04-20T06:26:00.011-04:00

Why do I have
so many questions
that I shouldn´t ask?

inazuma no
kaina wo karan
kusamakura?

(Can you share your arms,
fast as thunderbolts,
for a pillow on my journey?)

suspension

2011-04-18T22:14:00.027-04:00

eyes become like heavy sticky lenses
looking out an everyday window
the depth-of-view always causes reflection and emotion
that can go any which way
a heart beats so strongly it shakes the bed, like a shivering rabbit
wanting to slip a hand behind the chest, grasp it to calm it down
pills, sleep, and novels to question what´s real
finding a little relief in walking, listening to cliche songs, and comparing oneself to barbaric situations on the news
imagining the little details that have become unknown...

La pirueta

2011-04-09T19:23:00.009-04:00

thing 061384 to do on a boring saturday: onsen painting

matcha series

2011-02-23T02:27:00.014-05:00

ↄ M Saltzman