Pan´s Labyrinth (no plot spoilers, maybe theme spoilers)

This past weekend was pleasant but pretty much unremarkable. One notable thing-- my friend Rachel from OC was in town from Alicante, and we hung out Friday and Saturday nights. Fun but not crazy.
Last night I saw El Laberinto del Fauno at the multiplex in the mall near my house. No subtitles, naturally, which made it a bit tricky at times to keep the thread. Mostly I was very pleased with myself as far as comprehension goes. I had felt very comfortable watching The Departed dubbed into Español (Infiltrados is the title here if you´re curious), but I had already seen that film in english. (Sidenote: surprisingly good dub job-- lips don´t synch of course but in general when an actor´s mouth isn´t moving neither are your eardrums. Very hard to do. Yeah, you lose the Boston accents, but it´s still very fun to watch Markie Mark say "Tu. No. Eres. Un. Puta. Poli." to Leo DiCaprio, and Jack Nicholson´s face is a universal language. End sidenote)
So I enjoyed the film a great deal. The CGI is well done, the young woman who stars as Ofelia is talented, and the direction is near masterful. I´m generally very wary of pictures that boast a "Written, Produced & Directed by X" credit (of course I also really want to be X at some point in my life). In this case, Guillermo del Toro has done right by his script, which itself has very few weaknesses. The interweaving of a fantasy plotline and a war plotline is a delicate thing. Stray too far to one side and the places in which the stories stitch together become painfully, hammeringly overwrought; too far to the other and the stories´ only cohesion is at the level of one character and a common endpoint.
El Laberinto del Fauno treads this narrow bridge over filmic hellfire with great tact and substantial brutality, both physical and emotional. At the script/character level, del Toro builds characters that are sparse but not archetypical, three-dimensional but simple, a choice which works well within the film´s simple presentation of the combat between a group of Maquis guerillas and a fascist cavalry unit tasked with their pursuit in the Spanish countryside in 1944. By contrast, the characters in Ofelia´s fantasy world are wholly, intentionally archetypical, with far less dimension than any of the non-CGI characters. Ofelia´s dedication to the realization of the series of tasks presented her by the titular Faun mirrors her stepfather´s devotion to the quashing of the Republican resistance in the mountains, although their emotional motivations are wildly divergent.
At the visual level, del Toro´s direction serves without distracting. The film has a definite, unified visual style primarily centered around cross-cutting rather than camera movement. Movie´s like this one remind me just how much skill it takes to create good mise-en-scene, and at the same time how much balls it takes to be able to say ¡Ya está!, enough, we´ve got it, Action! The inexorable visual contrast between a leafy, dappled world filled with seemingly hopeless brutality and a dark laberinto no less full of seemingly promising fantasy imagery is the fire in this film´s belly. As the choices of the central characters drive both plotlines forward through their respective worlds, the nature of those worlds leaves the characters increasingly confined by consequence. The stunning nature of the film´s resolution is particularly impressive given the use of a framing device which has cut the feet from under many a decent film. Granted, it is incredibly taxing to follow the dialogue in another language. Nonetheless, were I to watch the film subtitled (and thereby trade the free wandering of my eyes for that of my mind), I believe I would bear no hostility towards the framing structure. I want to elaborate more, but I don´t want to screw up the experience for anybody who hasn´t seen it yet. If you haven´t seen it yet, please do. Be warned, it´s quite bloody-- not so much that you need hipwaders, but know that if slick Scorsesi violence turns your stomach that Pan´s Labyrinth may well have you peeking through your fingers at times.
Overall it is one hell of a good film, and I very much want to see The Lives of Others to try to understand how something could have beaten El Laberinto del Fauno for Best Foreign Feature.

2 weeks later...

This will be long, since I´ve got two weeks to catch people up on. Sorry for going dark for so long. I´ll start with the mundane...

Since getting back from Prague, classes have started. Originally I had five classes, scattered all around the week but none before 11:30am. Since then I´ve dropped the History of Spanish Film course, because it stunk. Honestly. The book consisted of approximately 5 pages of script excerpts, background information, original posters &c from each of the dozen or so movies we were going to watch. The basic class plan was roughly the following: 5 minutes background conversation. Watch 3-6 minute scene from film, paused repeatedly to allow teacher (who seemed to mistake our less-than-fluent Spanish for a sign of mental defects) to point things out in the frame. Lights up, 5-10 minute ´discussion´ of scene (read: teacher asking horribly obvious questions in Spanish such as "Normally when you have a gun and you want to kill someone, what do you do?"). Watch another short scene, after an explanation from the teacher of what happened in the intervening twenty minutes of movie. And on. And on. So yeah, I dropped it.

Otherwise classes are good. Actualidad Sociopolitical en España is well-taught, by a guy who bears an eery resemblance to Asif Talukder. Last thursday, instead of having a normal class session, we went to a conference room at the actual Universidad and heard a talk by the President of the Spanish Senate, which was interesting although hard to follow. This class also includes an excursion to Madrid which will include some of the sightseeing I didn´t get to do in either of my previous visits. Should have had this class today, but the teacher didn´t show up. This was probably because the teachers who are special to the Centro de Lenguas Modernas are on strike, and he didn´t want to undermine them. More on this later.

Historia de España desde Franco a la Actualidad is also interesting and fun. The teacher is a charming woman named Cristina Vara. Between the history and politics courses, I´m slowly picking up the Spanish version of classroom vocabularies with which I am so comfortable in English. Produccion Oral y Escrito (POE) is the required grammar course, and is taught by a guy named Aurelio. POE represents two things I normally hate-- requirements and grammar. He´s likeable, and the class is made up of a bunch of interesting people, two factors which make the basic thrust of the class completely bearable. Also, it turns out that a girl from Scripps who works with Laura is in that class. Small world.

The final course is Cultura Islamica en España, also very enjoyable. Several friends from the program in this class. I have trouble sometimes with the way the teacher talks about the religion itself, but since it´s more an anthropology course than a religion course I guess I should lower my expectations. After spending a semester on Intro to Islam with a woman who is versed in the academic study of religion and who is ultra-careful in her terminology and pedagogy, Barrios seems a bit rough around the edges. Nothing wrong with that, I guess.

So that´s the basic rundown of classes. Not too much work thusfar, although I certainly have homework of some sort assigned each class. Oh yeah, the strike.

I don´t know a whole lot about the situation. There are apparently several dozen teachers who are employed exclusively by the CLM. The Universidad de Granada still signs their checks, though. These teachers are highly dissatisfied with their current wages, which I understand are very low by any standard. The school has apparently refused to even sit down and negotiate this with the teachers, and so they´ve initiated a strike. It´s not a true walkout-- up until today, it hadn´t effected any of my classes. For one hour in the morning and another in the evening, this group of teachers stands together in the courtyard of the CLM with a banner and sings and chants and chatters loudly. Apparently there were newscameras there yesterday. Who knows how long it will go on, or if it will take a more severe turn. As it stands it´s more symbolic than practical, and it will be interesting to see if the relevant administrators respond to symbolism.

So that´s the boring stuff. How about travel news. Pictures? Stories?

The weekend after the Prague trip was a relaxing one. No travel in particular, just reacquainting myself with my city and its watering holes. It really did feel like coming home, which was surprising and welcome. Sebi was delighted to hear about our various trips. Eddie went to Italy-- enjoyed himself but wished he´d gone with more travel-hardy people. Bart went to London with a large group of our friends, and had a great, expensive time. As he put it, "Everything seems to be normally priced, and then in the morning you remember that one pound is two dollars."

This past weekend was much more remarkable. Friday midmorning we took a tour of the Granada Cathedral. Impressive building, impressive decorations, but really it just reminded me that I don´t particularly like cathedrals. Still, seeing the tombs of Ferdinand and Isabela was something of an experience. It´s really not difficult to draw a direct historical thread between (1) the work of those monarchs to vest political, social and economic power in the hands of state-sanctioned Hermandades (Catholic brotherhoods), (2) the impatient, near-revolutionary haste with which the government of the Second Spanish Republic tried to reform the country in the early 1930s and (3) the bloody three-year Civil War that completed the transfer of the country from Monarchy to Dictatorship. So yeah-- big church, lots of gold and silver everywhere, huge columns, impressive, intricate marblework.

Saturday was a lot of fun. About 40 people signed up to go to Ronda, myself included. Even though we spent slightly more time on the bus than in the town, it was completely worthwhile. It´s an utterly charming place, even in the cold and half-hearted rain. The place has two main claims to fame, the more well-known of which is the massive Puente Nuevo (New Bridge), one of three bridges that join the old and modern sections of town. The bridge spans a gorge approximately 500´ deep, and was completed late in the 18th century. This is a picture I took from the spot where I ate lunch with a few people. It was about a 10 minute walk down a switchback trail, and rewarded us with the best view of the bridge and gorge that we had all day.

According to Wikipedia, the same architect who built the bridge is responsible for Ronda´s other well-known landmark, the Plaza de Toros. This is the oldest still-used bullring in Spain, and also houses a small museum. Alongside full matador and picador outfits (some of them bloodstained) sits an impressive collection of art, much of it pen-and-pencil drawings by Goya-- a real treat. Our tourguide, a charming mustachioed Ronda native named Diego Martin, sat us down here at the end of our tour and gave us a smattering of information about bullfighting. At the very beginning, he took the time to tell us in english that referring to the event as a fight is, in his estimation, hideously inaccurate, since the bull has zero chance of survival. "The word corrida usually gets translated as ´bullfight´ yes? In your country you have an excellent expression for this...Bullshit." Diego Martin was a lot of fun.

So that is, more or less, my past two weeks. I´ll be more on-the-ball from here on out. I´ve just this morning booked a flight to Istanbul for Spring Break, and I could not be more excited if I was pumped full of ritalin. It´s going to be an amazing week. What´s more, I´ll have another four or five days at the end to spend either here in Granada enjoying the festivals of Semana Santa, or down on the coast enjoying the beach. Don´t cry, guys-- I´ll be ok. Here´s another pic I grabbed as my camera was dying, from the other side of the bridge. Love to all, especially the Southern Mass crew. Give hugs and kisses to Bernie from me.

Prague

Arrived in Prague on Thursday afternoon with Clare, Lauren and Cara. We hopped on a bus at the airport, hopped off at a trainstation in the Lesser Town (no offense), hopped on a subway under the Vltava River, and finally surfaced about five minutes from our hostel. The walk from the subway stop to the hostel took us through Old Town Square, ruled by two enormous churches, the larger of which is called Tyn and has two huge belltowers. The smaller of these churches is home to the Astronomical Clock, an amazing bit of fifteenth-century engineering that simultaneously tells time, the relative positions of the sun and moon, the time of sunrise and sunset that day, the zodiac month and probably some other stuff too.

(not my picture)

The other buildings of the old square are mostly shops and restaurants. It felt like we were walking through the cover photo of an architecture textbook. To get to our hostel, we wound around behind the Tyn church, ducked down a narrow cobblestone street, and hooked a left into a small complex of bar, vegetarian restaurant, spa, bookstore and hostel. At first it was disconcerting that the website we used to book the place proclaimed 'Excellent Location' as the place's lone claim to fame, but it really is an amazing place to be. We're less than ten minutes from just about everything in Prague 1/Old Town, and it would only take about fifteen to cross the Charles Bridge into Lesser Town.

We spent the evening strolling around aimlessly, sipping mulled wine and taking pictures. Dusk is a particularly beautiful time in this city. After winding around so much that we got lost and couldn't find our way back to the restaurant that had caught our collective eye, we stopped into a bookstore and got directions from a less-than-confident clerk who spoke pretty good english. On the way back to the Tyn church area, Lauren's appetite got the better of her and she hauled us into an expensive-looking restaurant. It turned out to be a great find. All four of us had a huge plate of pasta, alcohol and an appetizer for the equivalent of ten dollars apiece. What's more, it was phenomenal food. From there we found our way back and stopped in a very expensive but very cool bar and had cocktails and cigars and everything but a footrub from the waitress. Incredibly classy place, called Bar & Books, and claiming to have an operation in New York as well. Definitely worth tracking down, East-coast folk, especially if you've got someone to romance.

Our second day was committed to a four-hour walking tour, a nap, and an expensive night of drinking that ended at a 5-story club at six in the morning. Woof. I am still pretty damn exhausted as I write this. We met two Navy guys in our hostel who are on leave for a little while, and at the club we met a posse of Irishmen on vacation. It turned out to be an incredibly fun night. We may try to find the Irish crowd again tomorrow as they've invited us to a pub called Rocky O'Reilly's to watch Ireland play France in rugby. Sounds good to me...

Jim Webb Response to the 2007 SOTU

This is the single most important speech I´ve seen by a politician, let alone a freshman Senator, in the politically-aware section of my life. See also John Edwards´ announcement speech in New Orleans. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sBpBouaDXk)

Eve-of-Exam Update

Tomorrow morning at 10 I´ll be taking the test to evaluate how well I´ve absorbed the classroom work of the past three weeks. That´s mildly nervewracking, but not extremely so. I feel fairly comfortable with the assortment of grammar and vocabulary lessons we´ve been doing. The only thing uncomfortable right now is the weather. It was genuinely cold for the first time this morning, and it´s not dissipating with the arrival of the sun this afternoon. The past few nights of news have been full of images from northern Spain, where about a half-meter of snow has fallen in the past two days. There was a funny special report last night in which a reporter snowshoed through a small mountain town with his cameraman to interview snowbound spaniards. I think that makes him the rough equivalent of the "journalists" on CNN & the Fox Noise Channel whose job it is to hold a microphone while being waterboarded, or tazed, or demonstrating a new crotch-kicking machine someone has invented.
Another uncomfortable, ongoing condition is my laptop envy. Not having my computer means I end up spending ages on various public machines, reading the news and blogs and posting here and checking email. I´ve been sitting on one of the four AIFS office machines for the better part of an hour, with people waiting for a free keyboard. More than that, I´m very reluctant to either upload pictures to the web or take music from other people on the trip for fear that I may lose files and not have any backup for them. Will the first person to visit me please bring me my Gateway? Some sort of lavish special prize for whoever can make it magically appear in my lap.
The upsides of not having it are easy to see as well-- the several free hours I have each day are rapidly becoming tiresome, and without free internet entrancement as an option I´m simply going to have to go out and meet real people. The prospect of intercambios with spaniards is enticing, but I still haven´t worked up the nerve to call anyone. That will be easier after the orientation classes have ended. Speaking of which....here´s a (very) rough itinerary (all of which subject to change) for my week-long break starting next Tuesday:
10am busride to Madrid, arriving ca. 3pm.
1 day/2 nights of straight awesome, Madrid style, including Prado, but otherwise devoid of sobriety.
Morning flight to Prague, where I´m staying in a hostel for 5 nights with Clare and a few other heads. Hopefully this includes Kafka museum, many a Cathedral, many a cheap liter of beer, and the purchase of a pair of warm gloves since I am drastically underprepared for the weather in the Czech Republic.
Flight back to Madrid on the sixth. Five hour busride back to G. Sleep. Classes.

I love europe.

New World Water

you can laugh and take it as a joke if you wanna/but it don´t rain a full week some summers/and its about to get real wild in the half/you´ll be buyin´ evian just to take a fuckin´ bath
--Mos Def, New World Water


Whenever I ask Sebi and Rafa about the drought, Sebi expresses concern and takes the opportunity to remind me to be extra conservative with my water usage, while Rafa just says "No se nota," nobody notices it. At the same time, there´ll be at least one or two stories on the news in any given day about the rivers and reservoirs around the country being at dangerously low levels. It hasn´t rained in any sustained amount in about a year, as I understand it. Our resident director tells us there´s currently enough water in reserve for about 6-8 months, and that when that time runs out without any significant rainfall the government will begin shutting off water lines at night, and possibly even rationing water to households. Nonetheless the streetsweepers are out every single morning making the city sparkle (or at least giving it a dull, streaky sheen). Pilar and Inma, two sweet, helpful spanish women who work at the AIFS office, blame this on the politicians. Given that the economy is almost entirely driven by tourism, though, it seems a legitimate policy concern. Inma also told us that the spanish are notorious litterers, a statement bourne out by the appearance of the streets at night, and the floor of any given bar by about 1 AM. The ski slopes outside of town are still making fake snow so they can stay in business. Another tourist concern, doubtless. It also seems to indicate something deeper in the culture, as though the Spanish would rather cut down on showers and tooth-brushing than let anything impede their enjoyment of life.
It´s easy to romanticize that attitude, especially in comparison with a work-first, work-second prevailing mindset in the US (born of life in a voracious capitalist economy). The tensions paint themselves: sorry I´m late vs. nobody does anything on time; 50 or 51 forty-hour weeks vs. a month of vacation for almost every employee; consumption of things vs. consumption of experiences. It´s not hard to paint a beautiful picture out of that, but the fact is the air in this city is as gross as in any american city I´ve seen, the news warns of increasingly fat and docile children growing up under an increasingly consumerist society revolving around yearly fashion trends and class identification based primarily on appearance. Maybe that´s just the nature of city life (which is just as new to me as Spain itself, and in many ways harder to get used to). Maybe that´s the nature of modernization and an increasingly global economy.
I´m sorry I can´t figure out how to post the whole song I quoted from at the top-- it´s terrific, and even though Spain is far from the third-world Mos is describing it seems strangely appropriate to the current water situation here. So basic a necessity becomes increasingly politicized and marketed as the world develops, under the assumption it will never be scarce. Spain will find out how that works over the next 8 months I guess.

1 week over, 19 more to go...

It´s kind of hard to believe that it´s already been a week since we arrive in Granada. Time crawls like molasses over sandpaper. At the same time, it´ll probably all be over before sooner than I think.
Yesterday we went to the Alhambra and the Generalife, and spent about four hours strolling around the grounds, eating our lunches, taking pictures, etc. I simply cannot do the place justice with words; its an astonishing work of architecture and masonery. There´s a profound sense of history in the atmosphere that would be crushing if it weren´t cut by the trilling laughter of children, the squeak of stroller wheels, the whispers of lovers, the inaudible padding of feline feet throughout the extensive gardens. We walked up one of the steeper hills I´ve ever climbed for probably a few hundred meters to get to the entry gate to the garrison, where we met our tourguides. The group split into three tour, including one in Spanish, led by a woman named Estér. As she explains that the Alhambra was, in its day, an all-inclusive city, we roam around the main garrison area (which is free to all). There´s a huge bell in the main tower in this area, and in a once-yearly celebration women who wish to meet and marry a man touch the bell three times. There are also several of the most spectacular vistas I´ve ever enjoyed. From many points along the battlements there are astonishing views of particular sections of the city or mountains, and from the top of the belltower there is a breathtaking panorama of the city, the vega and the Sierra Nevada. If we hadn´t had another 3 hours of tourism ahead of us I think we all might have stayed here all day taking pictures.
Almost every room and hallway of the inner palaces of the Alhambra is decorated in ornate, handchiseled masonry. Arabic calligraphy winds around windows and fountains-- Estér tells us that the walls of the Alhambra speak, and if they did the name of Allah would constantly careen off stone and marble in a warm hum, propelling the crowds of tourists from room to room. She also takes time to observe a basic stylistic contrast between this and other palaces of old Europe. Where many castles built by Christian rulers display the skill of their craftsmen externally and are simplistic in their interiors, this Moorish world wonder is very simple from outside and shrouds its inhabitants in beauty. Alhambra means the Red Palace. What appears huge and plain in the daytime acquires a vague scarlet glow at night, as though the sheer splendor of the interior has too much energy in it, is the product of too much sweat and death to be contained by the thick tapia brick of the castle walls. Or maybe its just that they throw a few thousand watts of light on it from the outside that reflects the faintly red pigments of the iron that laces the local stone. Either way, its stunning.
More on this when I can post pictures. For now I´m going to try to get into a soccer game. The local team is in the Segundo Division B, which is essentially the third-tier of spanish soccer. Basically I´m going to go see Granada´s equivalent of the New Haven Ravens, except this will probably be way more fun than a minor league ballgame because people actually give a shit in the stands. Then I have to find a place to watch the Pats-Chargers game. And then I have to haul myself out of bed and go to class tomorrow. Great....