in the hall of mirrors

Prescription

So... Mitchell's response to my impulsive desires to travel to, probably, Barcelona, and getting a cat, is, quite sensibly: okay then, get a flight and then get a cat.

Melinda's therapeutic suggestion today was the same.

All right: I get it. Simple answers to simple desires. A casual phone call to Joyce, she was in line with the others.

Gloriously enough, Easyjet is having insanely cheap flights to Barcelona (or Sitges instead), or Nice (though the Cannes festival may make that a crowded option). So, trying to find a hotel, or apartment....

and later, a cat.

Transitionals

The unhappy weight of guilt around productivity has let up somewhat: since Mitchell has kindly started giving me my marching orders – literally telling me what chapter to draft next, and send it to him – and Melinda, going a bit outside the normal range of activity for a therapist, has chimed in asking for the same – I am getting some work done, and can remember once again how everyday, how easy, it really is to do what I think I am supposed to do, with my life.

So, when I lost the past four days to, first, a cluster of things to do for other people – a report on a doctoral thesis, a recommendation letter, a chain of minor administrative discussions; culminating with M.'s slightly anxiety-producing discussion with me of what he wants me to take over in the fall, which is definitely more than I wanted to take on – and then a big system crash and rebuild (two and a half days, basically) plus erratic stomach problems – it was all annoying but not depressing, not terrible, not merely Another Example Of What A Failure I Inevitably Am. As it usually is.

Although last night I looked through the supposedly drafted chapter, amazed that it was really just notes: and realized I needed to get up today and write out paragraphs, so that I would have something to send to Mitchell and Melinda on Tuesday.

In the night, this evolved into its own kind of panic – a dream of wandering through my neighborhood, then a few blocks away to an area I'd never seen before, with beautiful houses, sandy earth, and warm, dusty weather, where I discovered various castoffs and started to take them away. (Is that what scholarship looks like to my inner selves? – well, I admit, as today I need to go through a pile of secondary sources looking for the necessary points where somebody has talked about my current topics, it's not an inappropriate image.) And then, as I climbed a stair behind a house to another level, the dream turned dark and hopeless, as the things I'd collected were lost, and I was in a scruffy wasteland of urban trash.

Just a dream: but I woke aware that I was frightened of the possibilities of failure, yet again.

So: coffee, and attacking paragraphs, and cranking out – something. Some attempt to avoid, to hold back, to overcome, disaster.

•••

In two days, to Stuttgart for a week that includes Easter weekend, to work with Joyce on another long-delayed anthology. Stuttgart is, I think, the German version of Norwich – a rather isolated, boring town, pretty and well-off, but with a population that most of its compatriots treat as slightly ridiculous. I remember from visiting there in the early 1990s, an exquisite toy-like train system – a result of a highly technical town (home to Mercedes and BMW), lots of municipal funds, and a relatively small area and small population. Cute, to be frank.

Probably a good place to get some work done....

In Train

Headed home on the late morning train – pretty crowded but I can still manage a pair of seats to myself. (Hmm, that may be a fairly selfish choice; but I’m feeling tired/wonky enough (gastro again) that I think I deserve some space to myself (especially after the shared bathroom at the hotel – which is sometimes less pleasant than others – for this trip it was definitely a hardship)).

Reading Lady Montagu’s letters from the early 18th century – and how wonderful they are: spiky, funny, observant, with a slight edge that combines grandeur and satire. She is a sort of like a confident, wealthy, aristocratic version of Jane Austen a century later: a woman who blithely and calmly breaks all the rules of women’s behavior for her time, and uses politeness like a small dagger….

It’s also fascinating to see how different the various cities and towns of baroque-era Europe are: probably the most bizarre so far is Vienna – as she tells it, their clothes, habits and even their approaches to love affairs are so startlingly different than those of contemporary London that they could be on the other side of the world, or in another century. And, rather bizarrely, the Viennese court balls sound like a nightclub: men pay a gold ducat, women get in free.

Most of her best writing is too leisurely to quote bits of it; but at Ratisbon she discovered a place where every family argued with every other one, and during her brief visit she was expected to join one side or another of every quarrel – something she politely refused to do. Her explanation of this bizarre village ended wonderfully:

“I know that my peaceable disposition already gives me a very ill figure, and that 'tis publicly whispered as a piece of impertinent pride in me, that I have hitherto been saucily civil to every body, as if I thought nobody good enough to quarrel with.”

In a letter to her sister, she satirizes the problem of describing travels, and the features you’re supposed to pay attention to, when you secretly think they’re boring:

“This is also a fortified town, but I avoid ever mentioning fortifications, being sensible that I know not how to speak of them. I am the more easy under my ignorance, when I reflect that I am sure you'll willingly forgive the omission; for if I made you the most exact description of all the ravelins and bastions I see in my travels, I dare swear you would ask me, What is a ravelin? and, What is a bastion?”

Pretty good, eh... I think, after all these years, and despite being an American, that I’m beginning to understand the theory and structure of wit….

•••

As Lady Montagu passes beyond the borders of central Europe, into Hungary, various Balkans and finally Ottoman Turkey, satire fades as her fascination with true difference rises: and she discovers a need to be honest, and even cautious, in describing Europe’s old and dangerous enemy. Quite a woman: as exact as any noble warrior....

Notes from California

An enjoyable, if too short and rather fragmented, trip to Los Angeles – saw dear friends (and missed a couple who couldn't get in to see me); met a lot of new academics among the old ones; and gave, if I say so myself, a good presentation of a sexy topic.

Almost everyone in LA looked tanned, relaxed, attractive....

•••

On the stereo is a CD, the first of a set, the Cold Blue Complete 10-Inch Series. This was a set of 10-inch LPs (a witty if not particularly practical size) of young composers from the Cal Arts (California Institute of the Arts, in the far desert enclave of Valencia) gang of the 1980s – Peter Garland, Barney Childs, Michael Jon Fink, Chas Smith, Daniel Lentz – mostly students or associates of Harold Budd. Not many of them continued famous – the Cold Blue label didn't have much of an afterlife either – but they made delicate, shimmering musics while they were in their prime; it is a sort of intellectual refinement of new age music, a good example of what John Rockwell called the 'neo-impressionism' of the 1980s. I still own several of the old 10-inch records – I'll give them to our library, I think – and it is nice to have them rereleased in toto.

I wrote biographies on some of these guys for Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Music & Musicians in the late 1980s; some of them I faxed, or wrote letters asking for information. Others, like Fink, lived near me in Los Angeles (he gave me the scores for his lovely piano pieces, like uncynical Satie, which I still have in my office); or the strange and imaginative Chas Smith, who lived with his 'pedal steel guitar', elaborate tattoos, and plumber's truck over the hill in the San Fernando Valley. The only one I saw often, for a time, was Lentz, who was a friend of Laura's – rather unfortunately, to be honest; he was the unhappy, obnoxious alcoholic of the bunch, accustomed to heckling guests at dinner parties and pushing his girlfriend around (she sang on this record – and has since left for a happier life without him); but he did indeed write beautiful sounds.

For me, these musics, plus the more musically sophisticated side of commercial new age music (i.e. William Ackerman, Philip Aaberg, etc.) have vast resonance – they mean, for me, the hopes and pleasures of being a Californian in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the days seemed to shimmer with light, and the streets seemed always filled with cheerful, social people, all different, and many of them very unusual indeed. Like a LeGuin cityscape, or a utopian vision from a Sturgeon novel.

These delicate, isolated, gentle notes are a (utopian, nostalgic, fantastic) kind of healing music. A good thing, that...

Handing it Over: Living in Hong Kong Now [1997]

[Original version of an article published as 'Hand it Over', Frontiers San Francisco 16/7 (7/31/97) and Frontiers Los Angeles/National 16/7 (8/8/97).]

Flying into Hong Kong’s famous airport, which lies practically between rows of apartment buildings, I thought: Why didn’t anyone ever tell me that Hong Kong was beautiful? Because it is beautiful: behind the crowds and freeways, the mountains always rise above, the sea below. The great natural harbor is vaster than anything manmade – it is one of the jewels of the Pacific, as dazzling as Sydney or San Francisco.

Welcome to China

It’s easier to understand Hong Kong if you see it as the Miami of China: its southernmost big city, a sprawling mix of races embedded in a background of humidity and palmetto bugs, surrounded with apartment buildings and freeways. The main difference is that Miami has a lot more crime; in fact, as in European cities, Americans are surprised (and even confused) by the safety of the streets and crowds.

I first arrived last March after three months of nervous indecision, of trying to answer the repeated question: Why would you go to Hong Kong now? But that’s an American attitude, rooted in our long distrust of China. From here, it looks as though the negative media blitz – special issues of Time and Newsweek, more than eight thousand visiting journalists looking for stories – is all an exaggeration, a panic generated to make news. Some of that panic serves other purposes, of course: it turns China into an Evil Empire, giving our military something to fix on after the end of the Cold War. Besides, if we construct an Us-and-Them universe, it implies that the Brits are good guys, allowing everyone to ignore their ruthless greed.

So far nothing has really happened to alter Hong Kong. Some things have changed: by July 1st, civil servants had filed the embossed Queen’s head off of post office boxes. And the name of the city has changed, at least officially – we now live in Xianggung, which is Mandarin for the Cantonese name Heung Gong, or Fragrant Harbor. And those two names may give you a taste of the complexity of living here, where the barrier of languages and cultures is so high that only the most educated can cross it effectively. It may seem a trivial matter – whether I can communicate with a taxi driver in Cantonese, or whether a retail clerk can help me in English – but the constant slight mutual incomprehension reflects the endless confusion between China and the West.

Handover: The First Party

On the Thursday before the Handover, we went to a salsa party called ‘Adios Gweilo.’ Gweilo is Chinese for foreigner, or more accurately ‘foreign devil;’ it’s not a word for polite company, but foreigners frequently use the word to expose, and hopefully discharge, racial and economic tensions. The party is held in a restaurant that looks over the straits; the terrace has an amazing view, and we can see across to Kowloon, where someone is experimenting with green lasers across the sky in preparation for a light show. The skyscrapers behind us are covered with vast neon dolphins and Bohenia flowers, symbols of the new Hong Kong.

This week saw a change in the atmosphere, in the way people talk about the future. Hong Kong residents, whether ‘expatriate’ (the nicer name for foreigners) or ‘local,’ had been calm about the changes for a long time. Everyone seemed sure that life would continue to be normal after the Territory became a Special Administrative Region, or SAR, of China. A few Cantonese colleagues even showed enthusiasm for the ‘reunification,’ especially since China has made it clear that it wants educated Hong Kong residents as its new business elite.

Change

Prakash, an Indian, grew up in Hong Kong to run one of its many tailor shops. On a weeknight in March, he has gathered some friends – a tall black American, a quiet French Algerian named Mohamed, and two Chinese boys with the incongruous names of Wendell and Terrence – for a drink at Post 97. This ironically named café is above the chic Club 1997, which is only gay on Fridays from 6 to 10 PM; after that, it closes for an hour for “restocking” (of beer and customers). Upstairs, in comfortable chairs among the well-dressed crowd, I ask Prakash: aren’t you worried about being an Indian in Hong Kong after July? – especially as the Chinese government has said that only “racially Chinese” will be considered citizens of the new SAR. He shrugs and says, I’m not worrying, we’ll see what happens and roll with the punches. I start to laugh, saying: well, that sounds like a thousand-year-old philosophy; and he begins to laugh with me.

But in the week before the Handover, Prakash is not so sanguine. Walking through Yau Ma Tei, he comments on the posters, the red flags – and seems anxious for the first time since I’ve know him. Suddenly it is unavoidable, this event that has been talked about for years – and it may have serious consequences for him. Fortunately, when we reach our destination, a Japanese noodle shop, he relaxes and we check out the men, from the henna-dyed headwaiter to the Japanese chef; but man-watching can’t always compete with history.

Among the Chinese

Some basic words to learn: m’gai (with a rising tone) means thank you, please, excuse me; yau lok means stop here, useful on buses; and, most important of all, gweilo means foreigner – actually foreign devil. That last is slightly rude, like “queer” or “wop” – my Chinese teaching assistant is shocked when I say it, complaining, with a flip of her long black hair, that it’s “not a nice thing to say.”

If I may generalize about the more than five million Chinese in Hong Kong, I see  a division between two broad age groups. The older Chinese are often small and tough-looking; they look hardy, and many of them are survivors of war, revolution and extraordinarily brutal invasions by Europeans, Japanese and by their own people. Their children, on the other hand, are tall and smooth-looking, well-dressed, polite, and often exquisitely beautiful; they stroll laughing through the expensive malls and streets of shops, protected by umbrellas from the frequent rain – almost as their parents, who might have immigrated at any time in this century, have tried to protect them from the past.

Handover: The Rave

On the Saturday before the Handover was the grand disco/rave Unity, which attracted thousands of people to a hotel ballroom in Kowloon to see Grace Jones and Boy George. Grace couldn’t quite manage to get through her long show (face it, it’s twenty years since her heyday), but the crowds were ecstatic, and stayed until early morning. Many gay men were in evidence, and no one seemed to feel the need to act straight, or to behave well at all. Unexpectedly, everyone seemed to be from the West – huge numbers of Aussie, American and European partygoers had flown in for the event, including a number of tall Germans. And that was strange: these hordes of pale faces seemed remarkably big, loud, pushy, even boorish – I thought, have I gotten that used to life in Asia?

Sex: Oriental

STUD ALERT: David Wu, the athletic, charming VJ on Hong Kong’s video channel, can be seen any night tossing a baseball around on the Wu Man Show. He teaches a strange but hilarious crash course in American slang, wearing hornrimmed glasses and a Hawaiian shirt, where he buzzes along the strange interface between Cantonese and English, trying to explain the word “short” as in “I’m a little short today” or “Man, you got the short end of the stick!” His video presentations specialize in Cantopop, the local rock music, which involves a vast industry of bands and production companies, with listeners all over Asia.

Gay life in Hong Kong comes in two varieties. The first recalls the years of concealment, since homosexuality has been legal only since 1991: it is a social life of dinner parties and private meetings, featuring moneyed expatriates and their boyfriends. The other is the bar-and-bath circuit, filled with gym-built, stylish boys flaunting gold watches and cel phones. In fact, most of the time it looks like West Hollywood, but with fewer blonds.

In navigating this multiracial environment, you might learn a few new words. “Rice queen” (probably a familiar term) means someone who likes Asian men; you might figure out its uncomplimentary opposite, “potato queen,” meaning someone with a sexual preference for white meat. You may also guess that “sticky rice” means Asian men who prefer each other. Given this labyrinth of desires and fixations, how is a gweilo potato queen like me to get by? Should I chat up the British Airlines stewards who dash in every week, or chase down American sailors at the Fleet Arcade? Or should I change my tastes, as everyone suggests?

Hong Kong is heaven for rice queens, and not only because of David Wu. The hot, humid summers, endless construction jobs and self-conscious athletic activity mean that there is an endless parade of bare chests and legs, mostly belonging to the remarkably fit. The city also boasts several bathhouses, the most successful of which is the weirdly named Game Boy Sauna; its clients are mostly “sticky rice,” so gweilos, while not unwelcome, won’t have much luck. It also has not one but two karaoke rooms – and, on my single visit there, I was appalled to see them both in use.

Handover: On the Night

July 30th is a sunny, busy day, and we are all frantically making preparations that suggest a New Year’s Eve of parties. A friend calls, asking me to videotape the ceremonies; another dashes upstairs to borrow money before she goes to watch from a boat in the harbor. Another friend asks if I want to join his bar-hopping friends, watching the broadcast in different pubs descending from the Peak. But I can’t go, as I’ve been roped into playing with the Chinese drum group in the British Handover ceremony – and so, wearing appalling lime-green T-shirts and baggies, we march into the pouring rain to open a pageant called The Spirit of Hong Kong.

After our minute and a half of drumming history, the Chinese orchestra begins playing as beautiful sleeve dancers enter, accompanied by hundreds of children waving swatches of blue silk to represent the ocean, and others walking with red paper junk sails. This classical tableau gives way to groups that represent a modern Hong Kong – eight dancing credit cards behind a bunch of fashion models in raincoats and umbrellas, a troupe of young girls doing a Cel Phone Dance (one, look at your watch; two, raise an invisible phone to your ear) – and something that can only be called the Dance of the Strong Currencies, a roundelay with large disks emblazoned with £, $, ¥, and DM. This is all very graceful and not at all ironic – there’s no sarcasm about prosperity in Hong Kong. Of course, since it is the monsoon, it’s raining – the dancers’ sleeves are waterlogged, but they keep battling through their show.

After the Royal Marines, waterlogged but disciplined, end their long marching band segment, I wait backstage to see the fireworks. A charming but drenched children’s chorus huddles by the stage entrance. One of the guards, with that aggressive tenderness with which the Cantonese treat their children, hustles those of us with umbrellas over to collect little groups of grateful, blue-uniformed kids. Another guard eventually joins me and, when the band strikes up Auld Lang Syne, it turns out that he knows and plans to sing all the words, including verses I’ve never heard. He is tone-deaf but also confident, and it’s impossible not to join in. And so that was my Handover: standing under an immense souvenir umbrella in the pouring rain with four wet kids and a guard, belting out Auld Lang Syne in a slight Cantonese accent.

Sex: Occidental

STUD ALERT: There is a building by the waterfront of the island, past the network of freeways that recall downtown Los Angeles, called the Fleet Arcade. It’s meant for British sailors when they’re in town, but when an American fleet is in it’s full of nervous, muscular, short-haired servicemen. If you want to develop your talent for picking up servicemen, remember: always get them alone, away from their buddies. There’s a special Stud Alert for the tall, blond Brit who runs the bike shop in the arcade.

Some of the more successful bars include the classy, crowded Zip in Lan Kwai Fong, and Petticoat Lane in Central, which won an HK Magazine prize for best gay bar. The Fetish & Fantasy leather store, under the Central Escalator, serves as a community center for party tickets. All of these places are thriving, and the local hope is that, as Beijing opens up its policies (if not the law) on sexual preference, the Hong Kong gay community will be left alone. Unfortunately, as with all of the other British moves towards democracy and liberalization, the legalization of homosexuality was late (1991) and rather tentative; no anti-discrimination law was passed before the Handover, and a recent government poll showed that most respondents would prefer not to watch a movie, go swimming or sing karaoke with a homosexual. Nevertheless, Hong Kong gay life is highly regarded in Asia, where many cities have more cultural and legal oppression; at Zip, an excitable Irish boy with a great chest tells me that he regularly visits from Jakarta, where there is no gay life worth mentioning.

As for lesbian life, I hear that the vast Filipina population – mostly female, mostly working as domestics, and all extremely visible in Statue Square every Sunday – includes many women who have escaped the rigidity of family demands through lesbian relationships. Max and Gary tell me of their Filipina maid and her girlfriend, who – with her muscular shoulders and headcloth – are a startling contrast to the delicate, well-behaved women of the Chinese majority.

Handover: The Aftermath

Bernadette, a colleague from England, went back to the docks on June 30th at midnight to watch the HMS Brittania sail and hear the last piper play while the Royal Marines stood at attention on the ship. She found herself among a group of Brits, and when someone yelled, Three cheers for the British Navy!, everyone roared assent – quite amazing, since apparently even the Scots and Irish joined in. The man next to her turned and said, "We'll never see anything like this again – I'm Evan, and I'm from Dublin," and kissed her. She walked home up the hill, past the Governor's House, now dark, passing a number of well-dressed socialites coming from the last parties thrown for VIP expatriates. She says none of them seemed to know what to do – they looked lost and bewildered, as though they had just realized that they were in a foreign land.

•••

Late one night, I am awakened by a violent rainstorm that flings a river of water against my windows. I walk through my apartment without turning on any lights, and go onto the balcony to stand naked in the voluptuous summer rain. Down the hill I can see the outlines of villas and the vast bay dotted with the white lights of passing ships. And I think: is my view of Hong Kong distorted by my own luck in coming here – by the fact that, for me, Hong Kong has meant my first good salary, my first professional job, my first luxury apartment? But that is what Hong Kong has always meant, especially for the Chinese: a secure home, financial safety, a place where it is legal to prosper. Perhaps Westerners can afford to be sarcastic about mere prosperity; but here everyone understands how important it is to have, and to keep, what is theirs.

[Hong Kong, 7/15/97]

Sitges XI

That last afternoon: a major lunch, utterly Catalan food, in a fascinating but frankly rather bizarre restaurant. No wonder, maybe, that Dalí was Catalan – this was indeed surreal at many points – from the sausage tree (actually a grapevine, shellacked, with a selection of local sausages hanging from the branches) to the garlic soup, the rabbit and snail stew, the sweet wine to be squirted down the throat rather than poured into a glass.

Afterward, I was a wreck – what a meal, though.

Packing, especially all those peculiar purchases, liqueurs, food oddities – hope for me that they all make it home without damage or significant customs interruptions.

And this last night, at four in the morning: the bar next door lets out a wave of men into the street – and a wave of chattering, cheerful noise up the shaft into my darkened apartment; I'm still a wreck, but it's a great sound – and a short burst of rain punctuates it.

Now that I'm getting ready to go, of course it seems way too soon – what will I miss? Balconies. The possibility of that chaotic touch. Strange food to some extent, but even more normal Spanish tapas (sorry about the Catalan food, some of it was frankly more of An Experience than it was really good dining). The lazy wave of the day between large, vaguely labeled sections – in fact the evaporation of so many limits and restrictions and formalities into the sky, where they belong. Susan, and Rob, and Sebastian. The chatter of languages. Sitting by the sea in a restaurant, talking to friends, at midnight, hearing the waves. Walking around in sandals and shorts. The open windows of this apartment, opening out on to – balconies....

•••

And home.

Thanks to all the gods of bubble wrap, everything made it home – liqueurs, candy, bowls, food.

An acquisitive trip: and a strange one for Sitges, as I spent virtually no time in the gay social world nor at the beach. But I enjoyed things, and the break was good.

Now to rest a bit....

Sitges X

Words

Hmm. Over 6,000 words in the past ten posts, since coming to Sitges on vacation.

That's the equivalent, or nearly, of an academic article... okay let's say one a bit on the short side, 7,000 is perhaps more normal.

And only about 300 words of musicology written in that time.

Now I know that I am given to laziness and avoidance; and I know that blogging is considerably easier than musicology (I don't need a distinct topic, I don't need to organize arguments, I can just rattle on about whatever comes to mind). But this makes me feel – well, both pleased (oh look how easy) and displeased (oh look how misguided) – as though this outlines the difference between, say, reading difficult prose and watching television.

What shall I do?... it is an interesting question, at least to me. I know that, to some extent, all writing tends to feed Writing – the action, the energy, the process, grows, as there is more of it, of whatever kind. But how, how to fix myself to the various, and increasingly desperate, tasks at hand?...

A bit like Pessoa, in his various personas: rattling, wandering, maundering, on and on about the day and the people and his boring work as an an accountant; and somewhere on the way somehow managing to write poems, books....

It is, as a certain king says in a certain show, a puzzlement.

•••

Wanting to talk

Dinner – an unexpectedly cheerful, even fairly rambunctious dinner (I hope we can go back there – Rob didn't get in trouble, God only knows why, for lighting the candles by using one of those paper chopstick holders – on fire of course).

Fun, but... afterward, feeling a bit diffuse, a bit complex, a bit like getting over something, a bit like... talking. All a bit amplified by listening to some rather existential pop songs, sch as Barenaked Ladies' 'Pinch Me' ("On an evening such as this / It's hard to tell if I exist") or, very differently, the Eurhythmics' regretful 'Seventeen' ("We should have jumped out of that airplane after all"). In such a mood, I should perhaps avoid playing Porcupine Tree's 'Sound of Muzak' (very Adornoesque).

At least two friends' images appeared in my mind: I could call them – their time, it is midafternoon – but it might be a bit crazy, on a mobile from a beach in Spain. No emergencies, just... wanting to talk. To try out a few complaints and theories and ideas and defenses on someone, to have someone cluck in sympathy, and afterward to think, Ah now I feel better.

Such an important process: another reason to have a solid, centered social/home life....

•••

Saved

An hour or two of being indecisive, out of sorts, again, still: how ridiculous, you will say – I'm on vacation, in a town where there are so many things to do, why don't I just go do one of them?

And my mood, and decisions, are saved: a thunderstorm, torrential rain. I think of a time now ten years ago, when I first moved to Hong Kong, younger and more confused and more excited: and stood naked out on a balcony in the tropical rain...

which impels me to give you the article I wrote that ends on that balcony, which was published in a California gay magazine. Enjoy. Meanwhile, I shall go stand in the rain.

Sitges IX (Girona)

Today, cloudy, gray, a sprinkle of rain on the balcony. What a relief, frankly – much cooler (somewhat like a normal summer day in northern England!) – I feel as though I'm recovering from wilting, like a plant at the height of summer.

•••

A Girona

Yesterday, Girona. Much to do, lots of it tourist-style, but quite classy; also fairly refreshing in giving me change, energy, history.

First arrived at Xevi's place in Caldes de Malavella, an old Roman baths about ten minutes from Girona. Xevi had cooked particularly Catalan food – some tapas (a tortilla, butifarra with manchego cheese, olives stuffed with anchovies), followed by a rather grand platter of mixed chicken and prawns that had been cooked on a traditional base of tomatoes, garlic, olive oil. Very impressive, and odd in that Catalan way that mixes flavors most cuisines will separate.

Xevi's apartment is almost excessively IKEAcized – and I say that as someone whose walls are covered with Billy and Benno shelves – but very elegant, very restrained, very intellectual. He spoke most of the time about things that were very local, very cultural, very Girona, very Catalan – although I've always enjoyed the Catalan-ness of Barcelona and Sitges, this was much more intense, as is apparently typical in proud old Girona. Certainly I'd never gotten quite so clear about the fascination with and links with France – although this is much more about southern France; northern France can be as deeply resented as Spain itself is here. And, I suppose in keeping with the peripheral-Iberian discussion, we listened to a few minutes of some kind of Basque marimba – and agreed after one or two tracks that we'd both had enough of that, thank you very much.

Then a strenuous but enjoyable tour of Girona's old city: old metal foot bridges crossing the half-dried up river (made, as it happens, by Eiffel's company); an extended and constantly changing mass of old buildings, mostly medieval but overlaid on Roman ruins, with fragments of nineteenth-century imitations blended in and a little bit of modernismo. Very beautiful paths, gardens, arches, winding streets.

Although all of these buildings are engaging, as is the Call (the old Jewish section), the area around the Cathedral is almost alarmingly impressive – one gets an enormous sense of sheer power and money, that the Church was truly the source of everything important in this city. I told Xevi, you could see why anyone in their right mind would have wanted to become a priest. Underneath this – but not far under; there are a lot more Roman ruins left nearly complete than in most places – is the impression of a strongly built garrison, a beautiful but tough home from home for lonely Roman soldiers who were probably stranded here for much of their lives. (Although, even at the time, the distance from Rome to Girona was not so great – perhaps this was considered a rather comfortable post, certainly better than being sent off to battle Huns in the north, or to face weird primitives painted blue up in Britain.)

All seriously impressive, and deeply beautiful (especially the gardens and landscaping at the top of the city, which would please my eldest sister a great deal). Many tourists of course, but not so many as to make things annoying. I'm afraid I continued my acquisitive/greedy streak – we stumbled over the Benedictine-made liqueurs and candies I'd searched for at the store Caelum in Barcelona (because it was closed for holidays), so I bought three bottles. Which gives me a fairly serious task in my last three days: to get enough bubble wrap to pack these bottles up and get them back to my own distant English exile.

•••

Some fragments, from a train

... An air-conditioned train: I should have done this days ago – something different, a view of everyday Spanish life, a new city... inland, passing many small stations and towns in Catalunya: a wind in the trees – and increasingly there are trees: many recently planted, new forests in rows – others scattered, natural. Is Spain being replanted to reverse the ecological disaster from the end of the Golden Age, where massive deforestation for lumber to build ships flattened all its forests? If so, it's about time – and it might transform the land, once again: back from scrub and near-desert, to those endless, ancient deep forests...

... A handsome, athletic young mother with her baby in a pram – Freya would be very impressed. Though she looks very take-charge, even mannish (yes, I do gender theory but I'm permitted to say such things) – broad cheekbones, dark blonde hair and an even tan – when the train is rattling the holds the child with such tender intimacy; you get a sense that this is a child who will never feel unloved, who will have a strong emotional base in later life (and may thus grow up to be as confident and competent as her, or his, mother).

... The slow late night train from Girona to Barcelona, then to Sitges: all chaotic and delayed because of extensive work on the tracks all over Catalunya – evidently they are rather heroically trying to overcome one of the stupider innovations of Franco's era, when Spain rebuilt its tracks to a different width than the rest of Europe in order to prevent invasion by train (? – such a demented, evil old man he was). Here is that European August you don't generally see in Sitges – the one of masses of young people from all over the world, all with backpacks and sport clothing and guidebooks.

... Another time it would be nice to go on to Figueres, to see the Dali museum. Xevi says it's the only thing there is to see there; and normally I treat Dali with some of the scorn that is the inevitable response to his cheesier work – but an entire museum, with bizarre architecture and objects, in that mindset would certainly be, at the very least, different. Next time...

... A favorite Spanish moment: a man, in order to make a gesture that is of course invisible to the person he's talking to on his mobile phone, waves his hand away from himself – with the phone in it – thus becoming inaudible, and having to repeat himself... perhaps, this time, with a different way of emphasizing things...

Sitges VIII

Selling it

I suspect I'm not exactly selling my readers on Sitges this year.

Well, obviously that doesn't matter to Sitges itself – it can take the blow, I think – and most readers will have already decided, quite rightly, that the problems lie with me rather than with the town. But I'm thinking particularly of Patrick and of Mitchell – two friends who do read this blog, and both of whom received a lot of rather heavy-handed cajoling (from me, and in Mitchell's case also from Susan and Rob) to come along with us.

Well, it's true, you might find the gay community intermittently irritating. But if you were here we could go out together to places that would appreciate bears; there are definitely places where the non-perfectly-buff-and-non-circuit can have a good time – in previous years I've been to them – I just don't seem on track this year, sorry about that.

A bigger problem is the heat: neither M. nor P. are exactly hot-weather types (especially Patrick, who is not only metaphorically a bear but appears to actually be somewhat ursine, in genetic terms – perhaps a grandfather emigrated from Kodiak Island). And it is a very hot August this year – indeed all over the world, it's supposedly the hottest year ever. (Like all those who read newspapers, I can't help thinking – if this continues, and gets rather drastic, the era of visiting southern Europe for pleasure may be ending; and what that would do to the entire EU economy hardly bears thinking about.)

Oh well, sorry about that, boys. You know me: alternating polemics and truths....

•••

Storm clouds on the horizon... hooray. I am so ready for a tropical storm... in every way possible.

I'm off to catch a train to Girona (and yes I have my English umbrella with me). Ta ta.

Sitges VII

Tomorrow I shall go to Girona for the day – a good idea, as I clearly need to get out of my funk here (for which pardon me – here I am blogging about a lovely vacation spot and just handing you a lot of neurotic miseries; chalk it up to the heat, and reading Pessoa, perhaps).

Girona includes Xevi (pronounced Chevy), one of our graduate students – a charming, even slightly old-fashioned, guy, who is always friendly but with calmly polished manners; he wants to show me the old city, which should be a good thing (although, unfortunately, it is even hotter there than here).

•••

Good restaurants and bad

As I have said: near the waterfront is that wonderful tapas bar which we usually call Monica's (although that's not it's name, but Monica cooks and owns the place). At Monica's the food is good, classic tapas well done; cheap; and amazingly fast, with the still-very-charming Sebastian dashing around at top speed and offering excellent, hard-working, service. A popular, crowded, straightforward place – especially impressive as it's basically a hole in the wall with a lot of chairs out on the pavement.

But next door... Philip's: the bar where we wait sometimes, when Monica's is full. Theoretically a bar that serves food, the food is actually rather tackily chosen (chili and hamburgers?), but perhaps that doesn't much matter because hardly anyone orders any; the putative existence of that food is predicated on pictures arranged around the door, which as far as anyone knows may not represent external reality.

Worse is the rather inept and exploitative approach to serving drinks – for example, I asked for a Campari and soda; that good ol' fraud Philip didn't have soda, because he says they don't sell it in Spain (what about agua con gas, then, which isn't so far off?); so he gave me a Campari and – wait for it – tonic. Yecch. I hate tonic at the best of times – sorry, I think quinine is only good for preventing malaria – but the combination of sweet and bitter made a drink that seemed like something you'd use for cleaning drains. Now the trick to all this, and what makes Philip such a twisty bastard, is that he didn't tell me before pouring and serving me the drink, and watching me try it – he explained all of this afterward. Apparently the jackass has done the exact same thing (same drink, same decision, no warning) to Susan.

He charged for it, of course, although I ordered and drank something else... the ultimate in exploitative expensive-resort-and-transient-customers behavior.

In his defense, though, he would have to charge for it, wouldn't he? – because his bar is usually mostly empty; when people do go there, they don't exactly represent repeat business (one has the impression that his clientele is made up largely of the unwary). Adding to the general charm of his establishment, he started playing disco in the afternoon, and singing along with it – he was a bit drunk (never a good sign in a bartender) – which I suppose made sense as Monica's was very busy, but he had only two or three customers. Apparently this spectacle is, however, an improvement over the situation two years ago – when Philip's ex and business partner Rainer was actually around to help with the bar, they would enact vindictive little disagreements over every little thing. Now Rainer refuses to talk to Philip, or come to Sitges – probably just collects his cut every month... which tells you how charming their relationship must be.

Now these two restaurants seem to represent something significant in the world of hospitality: if you're going to run a bar or restaurant – and that obviously represents an awful lot of work; I wouldn't do it myself – doesn't it seem like a good thing if you actually like people? And – if you like them enough to enjoy serving them?...

But perhaps that suggests the definition of a good life: doing what you love, and doing it well, even if it looks like too much work to other people. I wouldn't trade lives with Monica or Sebastian, but I envy them their obvious pleasure in a job well done (even when they're run off their feet), not to mention their clear affection for those of their customers whom they come to know – which connects to the whole world of real hospitality, of taking care of people because you get pleasure from seeing them happy.

And, of course, by implication, it also tells you the definition of a rotten life: doing something you don't enjoy enough to do it well, to scam people you despise, out of money that you send to an ex who hates you – horrid summer, after horrid summer....

•••

"What is the purpose of your trip?"

That question they ask when they check your passport: it is a good one. Although I am not as disgruntled as I was several days ago, I remain a little out of sync with Sitges – I can't quite figure out why I'm here this year.

As usual, my response is to analyze – and to assume it is my fault; or somebody's fault, anyway. But perhaps simply asking the question is a useful thing... in any case, tomorrow I will experiment by going to Girona: to see if one of the purposes of this trip is simply to see something new – to see another of those beautiful old European city centers that I love so much....