Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Tapas Musicales

Where to begin? It's been a crazy week. Nina and I just got back from Barcelona, where we'd been vacationing and attending the Primavera Sound music festival. I'm a bit overwhelmed with experience, but here's what I got.

Our flight from JFK to El Prat took eight hours. Thankfully, there were several very long movies available to watch -- Nina and I teamed up on Les Miserables, which, for some reason, I'd been looking forward to watching. The rest of the flight I tried to sleep but mostly just pretzeled myself into different postures and periodically accepted plastic cups of Fresca from the flight attendants. Upon landing, we rode the Aerobus to the Plaça de Catalunya. Our hotel was in a neighborhood called El Raval, which was variously described as being rough and ungentrified, and as being a prime destination for tourists. We were on El Carrer de Hospital (named after the hospital where Antoni Gaudí was treated after being hit by a tram in 1926), one block away from La Rambla, the huge central promenade leading from the Plaça down to Port Vell. The street has two gutters on either side that are just wide enough to allow a car to pass, but I wouldn't want to drive it -- La Rambla is always thronged with people: People on their way to things, people just kind of strolling, and a consistent distribution of South Asian men selling cheap LED whirligigs (which they demonstrated non-stop); little devices to put in your mouth to make you sound like Donald Duck (which were also extensively demonstrated); and six-packs of red cans of Estrella Damm, which seems to be the Spanish answer to Miller High Life or Beast. There are several dozen kiosks dotting the street that sell flowers, postcards, and fruit juice. Places like La Rambla are the ones where everyone tells you to keep close tabs on your personal effects, so we did.

We checked into the hotel and promptly napped for four hours. When we awoke, we figured we'd better get our bearings and sort out our access to the Festival. We dressed and exited the hotel. El Raval isn't much like Williamsburg, as somebody suggested; it's got a lot more in common with SoHo, a mix of crumbling bohemian lofts and big new construction, brushed-metal coffee shops and dingy storefronts hawking third-world plastic crap. We crossed La Rambla into the Barri Gòtic, the truly ancient part of the city whose boundaries trace the Roman fortifications erected in the first century BCE. Walking around there is like a being a rat in a wonderful maze: The narrow, criss-crossing streets are girded by an irregular distribution of beautiful old stone buildings, each with rows of balconies dangling flowering vines into the piss-smelling gutters below; and there are a million tiny storefronts, some for hip-looking coffee joints, some for dusty old-man bodegas. The Barcelona metro is like the New York City subway in that the lines have different colors; and that once a swipe of your pass gets you into the system, you can ride the trains as you please. It's much cleaner, though, and has very nice amenities, like vending machines on the platform and ubiquitous and accurate countdown clocks to let you know when the next train is arriving. It shuts down at midnight, except on Saturdays when it runs around the clock. We took the train 7 stops to Parc del Fòrum. I wanted to get out at the Villa Olímpica stop to take a picture of the riot of scratch-graffiti accumulated on the blue station wall, but we were burning daylight.

Parc del Fòrum looks like it's half industrial park, half fairgrounds. It's right on what I think is a working harbor -- the guy from Hot Snakes claimed he could smell a "shrimp factory" upwind -- and its concrete and metal terrain doesn't particularly lend itself to recreation. (Parkour, maybe?) And yet there are several amphitheater-like structures across its dozen or so acres. The Primavera Sound festival includes a couple of these for a total of eight stages: One huge one for headliners, and others of varying sizes named after their sponsors: Ray-Ban, Heineken, Pitchfork. There's a central promenade, a kind of main drag where all the t-shirt vendors, record shops, and radio stations had discrete canvas tents wired with power and Internet. The first stage we found that night was a joint venture by the Spanish mint candy Smint (owned by Chupa Chups!) and, uh, Myspace. The band playing was Evans The Death, a somewhat goofy punk band with a lady singer and a bunch of dudes with a laissez-faire attitude about keeping their guitars in tune. They were great! Our programmes suggested that this night of the festival was already winding down, so we decided to explore a bit further and strolled down the promenade towards the crest of a small hill and the sound of another stage. ...Where we encountered a crowd of maybe more people than I've ever seen outside of Yankee Stadium. This was the Ray-Ban stage, and everyone was there to see Delorean, a Spanish dance rock band. They were good! As we hadn't eaten, we walked over to the food vendors the majority of which were gathered in a large open area with tables and a huge metal "roof" from which were dangling confusing bits of netting and metal chain, like the remnants of an oil-refinery circus that'd left town. We got seitan sandwiches from a booth called BoomBoomRest. They didn't taste like much, although they proved a bit troublesome later on. We looked for the WFMU tent, but it didn't seem to be open yet, so we made our way back to the hotel for the evening.

The next morning, we had breakfast at a small diner down the street from our hotel, La Granja Viader on C. de Xucla, cappucinos with an ensaimada for me and a jar of fancy kefir for Nina. And we ate lunch at Bar Pinotxo, a kiosk in the Boqueria Market in Raval. They were running low on provisions, and practically the only thing left was navajas (razor clams) which were quite good. It was great! Our goal for the day was to visit La Sagrada Familia, Gaudí's famous unfinished cathedral in Gracia. It's the thing that every guide book and fellow traveler tell you to visit, and once you do you can see why: True, it's yet another pompous tribute to the Catholic church, but it's strikingly, almost subversively weird-looking, like something out of H.P. Lovecraft's more rococo imaginings. We waited in a line wrapping around the block, and bought tickets to see the internals as well as the partly-unfinished towers, because, hey. The interior of the basilica is a bit like a forest floor, with the struts of the roof poking up into the canopy here and there, knobbily jointed like giraffe legs. Every stained glass window runs the full spectrum of the rainbow. To get to the towers, you take a small elevator that lets you out at one end of a narrow stone bridge that spans the two of the mid-level tower structures -- the taller ones are still being worked on, it looks like. From that bridge, you can see pretty much all of Barcelona in both directions, surrounded by Gaudí's geometrical stone-and-tile fruit trees. Across the bridge and through over some more stone walkways, there's a vertiginously long spiral staircase that takes you back down to the basilica. That one was actually harder for me -- with my acrophobia, babies -- than the bridge. Never look down.

All of the stages of Primavera were going when we got there that evening. We stopped by the WFMU tent, which was fully set up, and introduced ourselves to Liz Berg, Evan "Funk" Davies, Scott Williams, and Brian Turner. They were all super nice, and it was a bit of a struggle not to let on how thrilled I was to meet all of them. I pulled myself away before I got too creepy. I don't know how to describe our zig-zag progress from stage to stage. These festival sets are like musical tapas, if I can draw a rather facile analogy: They're short, and you can come and go as you please, sampling bands until you're full. In that vein, I'll keep the summaries short.

Savages, Pitchfork Stage: Savage, intense, weird. They were great.

Tame Impala, Heineken Stage: They're not my favorite, but their arrangements are nicely complementary, and their lead singer sings like a lady.

Metz, Pitchfork Stage: Very, very good. The presentation was a bit less dramatic than when I saw them at CMJ, to their credit. They're loud and fast and polished to a brilliant sheen.

Dinosaur Jr., Primavera Stage: Hey, it's those dudes! The guy with the hair. I'm not a Dinosaur Jr. fan, but so many of my musician friends are that I figured I should at least take a look. As they're probably required to do, they played Feel The Pain, which is a pretty good song, even if it kind of captures why I'm not crazy about them. And J Mascis sure can shred. "I never thought I'd see them in my lifetime," I remarked to Evan "Funk" Davies after wandering over to the FMU tent. "Yeah, but you walked away," he pointed out. "Yeah, well, I guess I know all those songs already," I said. And that's kind of how I feel about that.

Bob Mould, ATP Stage: We stayed for the whole set, although I don't think Nina's crazy about him, and I'm not sure if I am, either -- grown-up me is ambivalent about the sound that Hüsker Dü originated, even if it informed the style of every band I liked in high school and college. But they were fast and polished, and Bob Mould paced the stage with obvious joy, his nasal singing voice itself like an electric guitar line. And I don't know if I've ever seen Jon Wurster play live before, but, wow. That dude plays perfectly and makes it look easy.

Hot Snakes, ATP Stage: This band is loud.

Fucked Up, Pitchfork Stage: Wonderful, joyous, coordinated. Talky: Damien went on a riff about the rich heritage of Spanish hardcore. The sound system didn't do a lot of favors for the lead guitar lines, but even so, how can you not stomp your foot to Queen Of Hearts?

Death Grips, ATP Stage: This band is loud. Or rather, that dude is loud. He seemed to be playing solo, although it was hard to tell wth the smoke machines going.

We decided to head home around two o'clock, well after the metro had stopped running for the night. Nonetheless, we followed the crowd walking to the Meresme stop, figuring they knew what they were doing. Some did, maybe, since they kept going once they got there. The others queued up at the stop for the night bus, which was just a few feet from the entrance to the metro. The Estrella-sellers swarmed us like mosquitoes. Almost everybody said no, although one British girl's interest was piqued by an offer of cocaine. "Do you have it here?" she asked. "No, you go over there," the guy said, indicating a patch of trees and bushes growing on the meridian across the street. She demurred. And then we saw something awful: One of the South Asian men who'd apparently exhausted his inventory walked over to a sewer grate near where we were standing, knelt down and fiddled with a latch to open it, and retrieved... a fresh six-pack of red Estrella cans!

Estrella Damm: The toilet beer.

After what felt like almost an hour of waiting, the N6 arrived, and we got on. The night bus takes a circuitous route whose endpoint is the Plaça del Catalunya. It didn't stop near our hotel, so we had to guess where to get off. We chose a stop that seemed latitudinally equivalent but west of where we had to go. The twisty-turny streets of Raval got the better of us, and it took us quite some time to get home, running a gauntlet of Estrella salesmen and drinkers, the line between them becoming increasingly unclear. A few of them chucked foaming cans of the stuff at our feet, like gunslingers demanding that we dance. We persevered and made it back unscathed.

The third day, Nina said, looking at the festival schedule, was going to be a doozy. But the test wouldn't begin until the evening. During the day, we visited -- on Tom's urging -- the Museu d'Història de la Ciutat de Barcelona. It's part history museum, part archaeological dig, sort of like Christiansborg Castle in Copenhagen: You can go down to a basement level and actually walk around in the stone ruins of a part of Barcino, one of the predecessors of Barcelona. Of particular note are the wine-vats and the fabric dyers facilities, which included vessels for collecting urine from the general public to be used in the setting of dye. The depressing thing that I learned is that like so much of Europe, early Spanish history is pretty much just Roman history. I don't know. Is that depressing? I suppose in my ignorant way I was expecting something a bit less recognizable. We spent several hours browsing various artifacts of Roman occupation, mentally translating the Spanish halves of the plaques on the display cases. Afterwards, we stopped by La Plata, a small corner bar that serves three dishes, all of which are great: Sausage wedges pinned to pan-con-tomate (a Spanish stable); olive-onion-tomato salad; and a bowl of just-fried sardines. We timed our arrival to the Fòrum to enable us to see Daniel Johnston play a set at an indoor auditorium adjacent to the Fòrum. We waited on a stupendously long line -- whose progress took us on a helpless circuit around a couple who were really sucking the fuck out of each others' faces -- before realizing that we needed special tickets to get in. That was a drag, but we consoled ourselves with:

Breeders, Primavera Stage: They were playing the entirety of Last Splash, which brought to mind my middle school practice of taping songs off Z100. There was something weirdly restrained about their live performance, as if they'd engineered their playing and production to sound exactly like the album. But those songs are quite good.

Solange, Pitchfork Stage: She had a tight band with her, and she can definitely sing. But I dunno. The hooks weren't that big. The crowd (big for a small stage) seemed to love her, though. Or maybe they were just happy to begin with: A group of people behind us were huddled around a big novelty cardboard guitar pick -- a piece of Smint swag -- doing lines off it.

The Jesus and Mary Chain, Heineken Stage: Despite being Shane MacGowan's favorite band, they failed to move me. What is the fuss about? They'd erected a big cruciform lighting display behind them, which I think was dismantled before Blur took the stage after them.

Swans, Ray-Ban Stage: They play -- with gusto and sustained intensity -- a sort of of drone / noise rock that I found very difficult to bear. Although she liked them, Nina gave me a reprieve after about half an hour, and we shuffled up the hill to the food tent to pump more Euros into the Spanish vegan restaurant economy.

We walked down to the Pitchfork stage, where Titus Andronicus were setting up. Patrick propped up two paperback books on his guitar amp. We strained to read their titles. I think one of them was The Sun Also Rises; Nina disagrees. He addressed the now-substantial crowd in pidgin Spanish. "Hola amigos! Es muy bueno to be here at Primavera! Muchas gracias to Pitchfork for having us." He paused. "Pitchfork dice que Titus Andronicus third album es muy malo. Pitchfork es muy estupido! Muy, muy estupido." Patrick's voice was ragged, as it sometimes is, but he sang with abandon and the band (the Dudes) were delightful, as they always are. We took a brief detour up to the Primavera stage, where The Knife were playing. Nina'd wanted to see their acrobatic live set, but the crowd was so thick that we couldn't get close enough to see the performers themselves, just the huge digital monitors, which aren't much different than watching the thing on TV, really. So we ended up going back down to the dudes in time for The Battle of Hampton Roads.

It was after 4 in the morning when they wrapped it up, Patrick pointing at his throat to indicate that there would be no encores, but Nina reminded me that I'd pledged to stick around for King Tuff. "I do the fireball," sang Kyle Thomas. "That's how I kill them all." He sounded great, like a punk cartoon, maybe. I'd been lukewarm on them at CMJ, but at Primavera they were tight and efficient. Nina relented and said we could leave before their set was over, but I wanted to hear them play their hit, so we stayed until they did. Then we trudged up to the main concourse and said goodbye to the radio people. We spent a few fruitless minutes outside the Fòrum trying to hail a cab before giving up. Horrifyingly, it was late enough that the metro was beginning to run again, so we waited with the horde of sleepy / not-so-sleepy revelers to be let onto the platform by Control. I felt sick, babies, and propped myself up in the ass-clefts that are so helpfully molded into the seat backs on the L4. When we finally got back to the Hesperia, we slept -- I kid you not -- until 4 in the afternoon. Have I ever done that in my life? Surely not.

There wasn't much time for anything on Saturday, so we got some coffee at one of the many dusty Forns in Raval and headed back to the Frum. We arrived in time to see The Wu-Tang Clan take the Primavera stage: RZA, GZA, Ghostface, Raekwon, Inspectah Deck, U-God. "I don't know where the rest of our family is," said GZA before launching into Shimmy Shimmy Ya. "Maybe they got contractual issues, or maybe they missed their flight. There's one guy that's got a good excuse for not being here." They were accompanied by DJ Mathematics, who took a "scratch solo" or sorts, which involved mixing with his feet, Jerry Lee Lewis style. The whole thing was a sight to behold, even if those guys are getting pretty long in the tooth.

After that we visited the Heineken stage, where Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds were playing a set of extended arrangements of the classics. He had two drummers on stage pounding out a dirty beat, and he spent a lot of time undulating in and on top of the crowd, especially during a crowd-pleasing version of Stagger Lee, in which he focused his crotch squarely in the face of a young woman in the front row. "I'll crawl over fifty pussies just to get to one fat boy's asshole." So. That dude is looking well-preserved, and he must have hell of lower back muscles. I wonder if he ever gets sick of doing Red Right Hand.

We rounded out the evening with Crystal Castles at the Ray-Ban stage. Their set was almost -- no, it was -- eclipsed by their lighting display, which was complex, intense, and definitely Not Safe For Epileptics. The crowd overflowed the bowl of the amphitheater. A guy next to us who must've been really, you know, feeling it, waved a big black-and-white flag back and forth like Enjorlas in Les Mis. It kept getting in peoples' faces, and they shooed him away. But that set was our last one. We said goodbye to the radio people and returned to Jaume I. At my request, we made a post-festival pit stop at Nevermind, a horrible Nirvana-themed (!) bar in the Barri Gòtic, where we payed full price for two bottles of Estrella. It's... drinkable, though not good. We sat across from a heinous mural of Kurt Cobain in a shredding duel with Jimi Hendrix. I put a WFMU sticker on the lid of the toilet tank in the men's room, although given how clean it was compared with every other surface in the place, I expect my sticker will be expeditiously removed so as not to interfere with people, you know, uh, going skiing.

The following day, we walked to the Catedral de la Santa Creu, where there was a Catalonian cultural festival underway. The giants were out, a knight with a morning star facing some fancy lady, enormous, motionless, anonymous -- at least as far as I knew. Behind them on the steps, teams of tumblers were pitted against each other building human pyramids in a competition strangely relevant to Catalans. Later, we made our way to the CaixaForum in Montjuïc, one of the larger contemporary art galleries, and looked at an international collection of new photography, sculpture, and video art; and a surprisingly comprehensive exhibition of artifacts and film projections by and about Georges Méliès, the director of A Trip To The Moon. It was really fun, although Une nuit terrible brought back some bad memories. The National Art Museum was closed, but we walked up the Av. Reina Maria Cristina to the "Magic Fountain" anyway in the hopes of seeing a promised "light and music display." Which started abruptly a minutes or two after we'd sat down on the fountain's edge -- I grabbed Nina's shoulder in fright, to her amusement. We walked up the big staircase and around the museum to the old Olympic grounds behind it, the somewhat forlorn-looking torch-shaped Communications Tower rising above the trees in the distance.

The final full day of our trip we used the way I think travelers often do, trying to pack in all of the small things we'd put off or hadn't yet found the time to do. Working from a friend's list, we took the L3 to Fontana in Gracia, and walked to the Lucania II, a Spanish pizzeria. Spanish pizza reminds me not unpleasantly of the square frozen Krasdale pizzas I used to buy when I was living in Prospect Heights. Nina and I shared a pie topped with fried egg yolk and one stuffed with blood-red sopressata. From their we hiked up Carrer Verdi to Parc Güell, the gated community Gaudi designed for Eusebi Güell and his rich buddies. We touched the iconic water-drooling lizard. Then it was back down to the foot of the hill in Gracia, where we stopped in at a hot chocolate cafe (!) called La Nena. We'd hoped to find Spanish orxata, but we settled for two cups of molten suizo. Then back to Raval for more eating. La Bodega de La Palma was another recommendation from a native, but we'd twice found it shuttered when we'd tried to visit earlier in the week. Third time's the charm: They were open, and we ordered a round of tapas, which completely overwhelmed us. Cheeses, cured ham, patatas bravas, croquettes.

Hobbit! on the plane ride home.