The Sidecar is a legendary Barcelona nightclub in the center of the city that has a long tradition of giving space for aspiring artists and musicians to strut their stuff. Their slot for July 4th read, Alas Studio presents… At show time, the Sidecar was packed with a hundred-and-some young people. Jonas and I welcomed them in Spanish and English and cued our first short film.

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Greetings from rainy Barcelona. With the rains has come a high water table and every morning we are greeted with a fresh dose of our beloved neighbors’ toilet flushes bubbling out of the drain and into our patio. These are the joys of living in an old city. Those of you who know me best know my deep dislike of scatological humor and that I do my best to steer clear of Adam Sandler films and their ilk. But, I find myself succumbing to a strange Catalan preoccupation. You see, in the province of Catalunya there is a historic obsession with this most unfortunate bodily function. The most common Christmas figurine after the baby Jesus, for example, is a man bending over and doing #2. The exterior walls of Salvador Dali’s museum are decorated with a pattern of mauve, sculptured fixtures resembling dog-doo, and every self-respecting Catalan artist pays homage in his or her art in some way. Of course, our neighbors regularly complain that the government is not doing enough to keep the streets clear of both human and animal waste, even though every night the city is cleaned and scrubbed by an army of trashmen in their fluorescent green uniforms. Likewise, there is no lack of utopian visions and programs for human betterment. The human problem is not a lack of effort to clean things up around here, but that we keep on pissing and crapping all over the place. I’ll leave it to you to make the theological translation. Read the rest of this entry »

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How can I describe the last months? I spent last summer hiking through the breathtaking hinterlands of Northern Spain and running a refuge in a cow town amongst throngs of friends, relatives, pilgrims, and neighbors. This year, as the rest of the Agape staff headed for the hills, I retreated into my cave in Barcelona. For two months I have been working away day and night in relative obscurity. It is an awesome thing to be alone with one’s self. Not a few wise people have suggested that the reason we busy ourselves and fill all the nooks and crannies of our lives with noise and entertainment is because we dread our own company.

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LIFE : Our lives continue to be interesting. Recently, on our way home, we passed a crowd of drunk, English soccer fans (”hooligans”), brawling as part of the traditional post-game celebration. Exiting the plaza, we passed one such stumbling drunk being “helped along” by four or five of our neighbors as they rifled through his pockets. I stopped and yelled at them to leave him alone, causing one of them to charge at me muttering and gesturing something to the effect of, “stay out of this, or else.” Considering the situation in haste — his wallet or my health — I walked on. My coworker, Nate, recently interfered in another robbery provoking the thief to come at him with the sharp end of a broken bottle. Just yesterday we confronted a neighbor who was slapping and kicking his girlfriend at our front door. Actually, we rarely feel threatened by the criminal element in our neighborhood; they know us and they leave us alone. They leave us alone, that is, as long as we do not interfere. Read the rest of this entry »

A belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. I arrived in Barcelona on November 26 and as of today Alas eStudio is more or less a reality. My time so far has been truly remarkable.

La Ciutat Vella
They call our district La Ciutat Vella, “the beautiful city”. In our beautiful city, the streets are littered with trash, mined with dog doo, and streaming with urine. The walls are crumbling and windows are boarded-up. Nearly every door and wall is covered in graffiti. One especially entertaining local graffiti artist scents his trail with an enormous painted baby pacifier. We’re making efforts to eradicate the graffiti on our own doorpost, a barely legible message to “Samantha“, undoubtedly sprayed there in a moment of passion. During one experiment with a chemical paint remover, a clutch of neighborhood kids seized our cleaning supplies and began scrubbing away at the graffiti. They were only making it worse, but it struck me as a really sweet kind of Sesame Street moment. I kept up as best I could, teaching them how best to scrub, supplying each of them with new steel brushes, and generally trying to minimize the damage. Well, before long, sponges and brushes and splotches of paint in their wake, they demanded payment. When I offered a gift instead, they weren’t interested, running around the studio till they found my change and snagged a good portion, earning them the title, “little punks“. Read the rest of this entry »

If you ever need to film blood, do not, I repeat, do not use real blood. Even if a friend of a friend, for reasons unknown, happens to have a jar of blood to donate for this purpose, resist the temptation to use it, however great the desire to be authentic. It turns out that the stench of stale blood is fearsome. In the end, after experimenting with all kinds of off-the-shelf liquids, I discovered a coffee and wine concoction that worked to great effect. I thought at the time how easy it was as an artist to forget the real tragedy of one’s subject matter amidst technical issues, while pushing pixels or playing with flour and red food coloring.

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Our lives are at once bitter and sweet, beautiful and horrible. Louis Armstrong whispers “O What a Wonderful World” while another Rages Against the Machine. Sixpence pens songs about “This Beautiful Mess” and Alan Paton puts his “Cry for the Beloved Country” to paper. They all speak truly, for this is the human condition.

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I sit amongst a group of Spanish pilgrims tending their blisters and sore muscles. Over the top of my laptop I see a dirt road winding through several stone barns and homes. Cows lounge, cats nap, and flies — oh so many flies! — buzz about. I try hard not to be intimidated when neighbors walk by with a foot-long machete in hand. Maria passes with a weighty bale of hay on her back, her beaming smile undiminished by her seventy-three years. This is Ligonde. During the month of July my digital lifestyle finds itself squarely stuck in the roundabout days of rural life. I am working at 4800bps on a radio modem from the Fuente del Peregrino (Fount of the Pilgrim), a refuge for pilgrims traveling the Camino de Santiago.

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Today has been an especially good day in Spain. As usual I am writing from a café, with my café con leche in hand. Just a moment ago while clearing a litter of twenty empty glasses in front of me the waitress made a crack about me having drunk quite a bit and having made quite a mess. Not only did I get the joke, but I managed to respond that, “Yeah, I was really thirsty.” Humor is especially difficult in a second language and it was an encouraging sign that I’m understanding. Earlier this evening, for a change of pace, I walked to a Lebanese and then an Italian restaurant near my apartment. (It is wonderfully ironic and indicative of our times that I find myself going to an Italian or Chinese restaurant when I want to feel a little more at home.) Both were closed. Instead I ended up at a previously undiscovered Spanish restaurant and dined on two fantastic Spanish specialties, gazpacho and paella. At work I put the finishing touches on the website for Agape’s national video and photography contest, “El Mundo Atraves de Tus Ojos” (“The World Through your Eyes” at comoloves.com), made significant strides in learning our film-editing software, and tutored a Spanish coworker on how to build a webpage.

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