It is a daunting task being any kind of an artist. At best, we hope to make a supplemental income from some truly extraordinary effort while smashing our collective foreheads soundly with a deep thud against a brick wall covered in Rihanna posters. Is that what they are pushing today? Hell if I really know. The cash cows are polluting our minds with rancid tripe. It’s like when I broke down one night and picked up taco bell on the way home. It would have been better to starve. And I am — starving. I am a starving artist with wet-brain disease from mtv drama and mad cow disease from salivating cow photographers on every corner, following me. Destroying me and all semblance of artistic form. Oh, today I die. And unfortunately tomorrow I die too. It’s some bad broken record that skips like the island on “Lost”. But don’t despair, because there is some old nuke waiting to blow the cash cow industry to bits. Too bad I don’t know where it is. Maybe Jack can save us.
Mass produced everything is cheaper. And child-labor from China and other countries make it near impossible to compete. Can I compete with children making 10$ / month? No. Can I compete with a machine that can make cheap prints, if only you buy a million at a time? Hell no. I don’t have money like that. All my money went to Goldman Sachs. Yours did too. They own us. But don’t let them own our art, our minds, our souls.
Who told Ringo Starr he could sing?? Wow, I saw him on Jon Stewart last night and his voice and style are a sleepy train wreck. Not the kind where you are fixated on the event where you can’t get away and the horror becomes imprinted in your mind. No, not that. This was like global warming at the North Pole. You can’t see it. People tell you it’s happening so you kind of assume it is. I mean, shouldn’t there be ice there? Shouldn’t Ringo be at least a washed up super-hero with an expanded belly and loss of x-ray vision but maybe he can still run a little faster than that girl down the street with cerebral palsy? Yes, Ringo is the melting ice sheet without the glory. Watching it was a slow death, which brings me to my point. He is a cash cow that had mad cow disease about 10 years ago, but thinks he’s still angus prime because these vast media companies tell him he is and market the hell out of him with money. You throw money like that into marketing, and you could sell bat shit. Oh, yes, at my day job we do sell bat shit. People love it. It’s better than Ringo, and the media industries too.
In summation, buy my art because good Americans buy from their neighbors. If you don’t, you have wet brain and are a commie loving chinese man that beats children.
no disrespect.
toward the nearby Rambla de Poblenou. Now Poblenou is one of the many neighborhood burroughs of Barcelona and I hadn’t explored it yet, so there you go.
was better is the photos came to me while I sat there sipping on tea by some 500-800 year old church. There were some tables of tasty cheeses and other wares in the plaza as well – a temporary setup as you see here and there around the city. So, yes, you don’t always need to go to the photos. Sometimes it’s better just to kick back with your camera and wait, and then be very sly. Some people get very angry about photos. Like the old chinese lady who ran me out of her store. And, I am guessing this guy here would get VERY cranky about having his photo taken, but hey that’s the front lines of photography, right? No, that cane is not for a gimpy leg! Of course I’m saving the best shots of him (and everything) for my book.
burroughs. I read on wikipedia that the city of Barcelona was 1.6 million people, but then read further and the Barcelona metropolis (it’s not like dallas and plano, the metropolis really is all Barcelona) is 4.6 million. No wonder I felt like the place was so busy. Look at all the people!! Oh yes, on to Guell, for the second round. Got yelled at by children playing a soccer match for photographing. “No photo! No photo!” No problem, they were terrible shots anyway and you couldn’t even see the people because I had the wide angle on and I was far away, through brush. I really have no idea how they even saw me amongst like 4.2 million other Barcelona visitors that all had their cameras out taking photos of everything there. The trick at Guell? Taking a photo that hasn’t been shot 10 million times. Uggghh. Well, it’s a challenge but I got a few that maybe weren’t exactly like everone elses. And, I got one that is amazing (in the book, more of a shot of a person at Guell).
haven’t bothered to figure out the bus system which might or might not go there. So, we took the metro to the nearest point which is below the hill where the Catalan museum and the Olympic Park reside. From there, we hoofed it. Up, up, up, stairs, up, hills, up, stairs, up escalators, up walking… On and on and on.
After spending thirty minutes or so in there, I was tired and finished and couldn’t use my big camera so it was time to move on. On the far side of the cemetary you can see the commercial shipyards and the sea. They were as busy as the rest of the city. We finally wound our way down and eventually found the only other exit from the cemetary, which led onto the main highway which runs by the sea all the way from Barcelona to Valencia. From there we walked along the highway for nearly two hours and finally made it home, with very tired feet and ate some leftover Barcelona Fajitas that I made. Yes, I finally found tortillas!! And one Mexican restaurant too, which has the best mojitos and tequilla sunrises ever. The food there was ok, but not great. They have a deal if you order two things you get some free nachos. The free nachos were like 7-11 nachos with chili and fake cheese. Don’t ask me where they find that fake cheese in this city because I wouldn’t have thought it could be done. And guess what? Those nachos hit you later the same way the 7-11 nachos do. Ouch. haha.
many sleazy Moroccans approach women and don’t take no for an answer, which is one of the ways they get their poor reputation with just about every other ethnic group in town. Nobody here like Moroccans, particularly the Pakistanis. I know that Muslims here don’t normally wear their robe things, but on Friday they did so it must have been some kind of holy day or festival. I know that even the Asians speak Spanish here, and that if you are in a fine restaurant you can almost guarantee that the waitstaff knows a modicum of English.
Barcelonetta is a quiet burrough with the gridded city streets, but lively along the edges which are beach. Barcelonetta is a short little peninsula.
Montjuic in front of the Olympic Park. It was rather extensive and had a great variety of artwork. But most noteworthy was a piece of graffiti outside the place on one of the stairway railing columns. It said “Catalania is 
not Spain!” in English. So why in English? Was it an American or Brit? I think that is unlikely. I can’t imagine what American or Brit would care at all about some locals only cultural indication. And enough to graffiti it… No I think it must have been a local. Why English? It would have been in Catalan, but perhaps this Catalan man or woman did not know Catalan, as the language was nearly stamped out by Franco before making a late resurgence (you find Catalan on many menus and signs and it is significantly different from Spanish, as much so as Italian or French). No, I think this man or woman knew English as a second language and refused to use Spanish to write that Catalonia is not Spain.
leche. After that it was determined that we would go on a “treasure hunt”. A couple nights previous, it was determined, while sitting around doing nothing with no tv and no music and no internet that we should do a kind of photographic treasure hunt – so a list was made. What we were looking for yesterday was: pandora’s box, insight, the key, the throne and the garden. Now, let me tell you, taking photographs of what’s there is one thing, while actively searching out and creating photographs of preconceived ideas is quite another. That is no easy task, even in a place as diverse as Barcelona!! But, we did get photographs of pandora’s box, the key (the photo is a keyhole, but abstractly it the same concept) and insight. How do you photograph insight?! This is what I was mulling over most of the day when Misty finally saw “insight”, so she gets full credit for that.
displayed all over the place. One was even placed in the branhes of a small tree. Artists milled about, and there were a couple musicians here and there mixed in with students with books, probably not really studying, but feeling better about having a textbook with them. We found a little cafe with outdoor seating at the edge of the plaza and got a snack. I ordered swiss fondue with curry and toast with thin duck slices, but the waiter said the fondue was only at night, so I amended the order to add sauteed mushrooms with bacon and “nachos”. Yes, nachos! Ok, they weren’t really nachos but it’s the closest thing even resembling Mexican food I have yet found. It was tortilla chips with a bowl of real cheese, melted and stirred with about three peppers in it. Of course peppers are easy to come by here, but tortilla chips? They almost don’t exist. It was awesome.
days that I was dying to play a guitar out on the street, and then, lo and behold, this guy offers me his guitar. Awesome.
the photos (which showed later – I think I must have shot 50 + good photos yesterday), so we contiued on into the Born and discovered many cool shops where Misty bought some earrings and a skirt and I found an awesome shirt (shown below). We wandered some more and after finding two of our three “treasure hunt” items, suddenly we were back at the restaurant we had lunch at. We basically had wandered completely aimlessly for a couple hours and there it was. And it was night, so we went back for the fondue! Though, I decided on the mustard and tarragon fondue instead of the curry. It was really, really good.
