Wednesday 29 April 2009

A sculpture is a sculpture, marmelade is marmelade...

Obvious, yes? Maybe not - especially if the sculpture is either made of marmelade, or of marmelade. What they hell am I talking about? To find out you'll have to read my review of SJ Esau and The Wave Pictures @ Club Neu! last Saturday
http://www.the-fly.co.uk/words/reviews/live-reviews/4704/the-wave-pictures-&-sj-esau

We had spent the afternoon before hanging out with Mr Esau himself - Sam - as he's an old friend from Bristol and had very kindly played at our wedding; his songs had sound-tracked much of our journey around Europe last year. We showed him Plaza Major and the St Gines Chocolateria (a must!) and then met him later before the gig. Along with his Italian friend Nadia (who now lives in Segovia) we were about the only people at the gig who knew who he was, but he seemed to go down very well!

After the gig, it was our Spanish friend Jaime's birthday party; he's a busy boy and this was actually the first time we had managed to see him since the Pueblo Ingles week last year, so it was great to hang out with him again and meet his lovely wife Teresa. Belen, another Pueblo Ingles friend was there with our lovely Venezuelan friends David and Natalie in tow, so much fun was had in the little underground bar Jaime had booked for the occasion. A very lazy Sunday followed as a result!

Friday 24 April 2009

all quiet on the Spanish front...

We haven't been writing much recently.

This is a plain lie. Actually Kate and I have been writing a lot recently; it's one of the reasons this blog has been so quiet!

A few months ago we were looking through "In Madrid", a monthly English-language newspaper/what's on magazine, when we both came across little advertisements in the classifieds that interested us. For Kate it was the guitarist looking for fellow musicians and song-writers for musical get-togethers; for me it was the advertisement for a Madrid writers' group.

Both organisations were slow to get off the ground - with both of us working evenings, weekend get-togethers are a necessity - but they seem to have really hit their stride recently. As a result much of our creative energy has been devoted to producing material for or during these sessions; Kate with her bluesy paens to Madrid's unattractive canine community and me a film script for an allegorical coming of age film.

It's been great to be doing something creative again; but it hasn't left much time for blogging!

Wednesday 22 April 2009

Flamenco Fiesta

Last Saturday our flatmate Alex, who has just got back from Mexico, threw a party for some his friends, which - after Kate had got her guitar out and played a few enthusiastically-received songs - turned into an improvised Flamenco show in our kitchen. We filmed a little bit of it:

http//www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmXJnD6K95k

No idea what he's singing about, but it sounded pretty rude and clearly had the crowd in hysterics.

Saturday 18 April 2009

Totally Hooked

After successfully giving up alcohol (temporarily, anyhow), quitting cigarettes (ten years ago) and limiting my coffee intake to a maximum two cups per day, my addiction-free lifestyle has hit the rocks rather badly. I blame my flat-mate Alex. Ever since we've lived here, we've been enjoying free entry to Club Alex, a handbag-house spectacular staged regularly in our kitchen by Pedro Alejandro and his trusty laptop. Many's the time I have wiggled my hips and performed abominably cheesy dance moves over the simmering pasta, little suspecting the ambush that lay ahead.

A moment of geeky interest in the source of Alex's extensive gay disco repertoire produced an enthusiastic response from Alex. "It's Spotify!" He told me "You should try it".

The only previous reference to Spotify I'd come across was in an online news article, which I'd downloaded purely for teaching purposes because it had so many excellent examples of the Passive Voice ("to be" plus past participle, example sentence: I was arrested for apalling dance moves by the Disco Police).

So, seeking a little music while at my mum's in France and needing a change from our over-familiar CD and MacBook collection, I Facebooked Alex in Mexico (really, this has become very geeky all of a sudden, I do apologise) and asked for a link and invite to the Spotify site. Alex obliged almost immediately, so I registered, downloaded the software and before you could say "gay disco" I was clicking my way merrily through a forest of tracks.

Being a slightly obsessive music lover anyway, I was instantly hooked. Loads and loads of tracks from a huge variety of genres and eras just a double-click away. Because the audio is streamed rather than downloaded, all you need is a half-decent internet connection to rampage through the available catalogue at will.

Which is exactly what I've been doing at every conceivable opportunity. After a year without my previous favoured provider of new and half-forgotten music, BBC 6Music, it's been bliss to feast my ears on a host of fresh stuff. In the days of yore I was a dedicated user of the Napster website (before it got legalised) and although I downloaded loads of tracks without paying for them, my monthly CD bill went through the roof as my discoveries fuelled my desire to possess more and more tunes. On balance, I'd say the record industry gained much more from me than it lost in those Napster days. I was bereft when it had to close down and none of the other file-sharing, peer-to-peer, thoroughly lawless internet data sharing processes have ever quite done it for me in the same way.

The beauty of this one is that it's perfectly legal, as well as being free (if you don't mind putting up with the occasional advert - you can pay for a commercial-free service if you want) and although it's all streaming audio, you can grab the tracks you like and stick them in playlists rather like the ones on iTunes, so you can find them for instant gratification whenever you need to.

My only worry is if something happens to our internet connection. Without my constant supply of new music I think there might be serious repercussions to my health. Cold turkey, the lot. I'd probably get the shakes and start gibbering or something. It's all getting rather worrying, actually.

Monday 13 April 2009

Finally!

We finally did something we've been meaning to do, and saying we were going to do, ever since we moved to Madrid - we went to the Prado.

The most visited museum in the world - or so I read somewhere - is right in the very heart of Madrid, backing onto the Retiro and housed in a sumptuous neo-Georgian building. It's free in the evenings, including Sundays from 5 til 8pm, so we wandered over on what was another pleasant Spanish afternoon. (The weather has since turned rather April-ish - lots of mizzle)

It's huge. Naturally we only looked at a fraction of the permanent collection, the rather ghostly, noir Goyas - his black phase - and the utterly mental flights of religious fancy by Mr H Bosch. There was also a temporary exhibit of Pre-Raphaelites on loan from, of all places, the MAP institute in Puerto Rico. I can't really imagine what resonance the people of that American colony find in 12ft by 40 ft paintings of the sleep of King Arthur or Leighton's marvelously sensuous "Flaming June". But anyway, we're pleased they came to Madrid.

We must go back.

Saturday 11 April 2009

it's a conspiracy....

Driving back from Kate's mother's house near Montcuq to Madrid, a lazy 12 hour stretch, we narrowly avoided getting sucked into the hellish outskirts of Bilbao (again).

There is a clearly a conspiracy, probably hatched by an unholy trinity of freemasons, anarchists and opus dei members, to direct all traffic between San Sebastian and Burgos via Bilbao - there are clearly vested interests at work here. Somebody is getting a big pay off somewhere from all the lost tourists and travellers who end up stranded in Bilbao's claustrophobic valleys when they were seeking the wide open plains of Castille y Leon.

There are at least 3 motorway routes that will take you from San Sebastian to Burgos (and probably numerous A-road routes). However, only the longest way - via Bilbao - is actually signposted 'Burgos'. It was the same story heading too France, trying to follow 'Francia' signs. Both of the other routes involve going via Vitoria Gasteiz, which mysteriously disappears from road signs and thus you plunge relentlessly towards Bilbao, drawn by roadsigns evilly leading you off course with false promises of a quick, easy route.

Don't get me wrong, I quite like Bilbao - I just hate driving there.

Saturday 4 April 2009

happy holidays!

It's Semana Santa (Holy Week aka Easter) in Spain so we're both on holiday along with the vast majority of the Spanish population! Hurrah!

Today we're going to meet up with some friends and then tomorrow we're off to France for the week, staying at our favorite luxury resort, Chez Cathy & Jean, where the full-board menu is mouth-wateringly good and the laundry facilities second to none! We'll be there for the week, then we're going to call in to San Sebastian on the Basque coast on the way back and hopefully meet a friend there.

Happy Easter!