this time, hopefully
in that film princesas, the one i said i would write about but still haven't, one of the characters, caye, talks about nostalgia. she talks about how she doesn't feel nostalgia because she's never had anything happen to her that was good enough to miss. but occasionally she feels nostalgia for things that haven't happened yet, for how wonderful things will be one day. i do nostalgia a fair bit over here. after hearing those words in the film i started thinking about a recent night, and the nostalgia came. what was the nostalgia? i think it was just the object of doctoring remembered images. of capturing them at their most fantastic and intense, of drawing out of the experience and viewing it from above. of making it filmic. because i imagined us walking down thaqt street and pulled back. i saw us how i could never have seen us in that moment. because i couldn't see me. all i could see was her and the streets in front of me. in my nostalgic moment, i could see us there, in that street. it struck me as being like cubist composition. where all points of perspective are combined into an image. making the two dimensional three dimensional. or at least, including more than conventional two dimensional representation. the nostalgic does something similar, taking in known perspectives, and combining them to make something more than just a conventional memory. the other point in my little nostalgia/cubism thing is the prominence of collage. people are always making nostalgic collages. and collage was always big in cubism, especially using found objects, or materials from the object. like sticking a piece of fabric into a collage with a picture of all your friends. the collage creating an assembled image of all your friends that would be completely impossible for any one photo of any one time-space.
i knew that class would be cancelled. i knew it. but i went because i decided that i would at eleven last night. so i pull up my inpenetrable shutters to reveal only the darkness trying to penetrate into darkness. i take trudi down in the lift and we pedal off furiously to uni. i haven't left much time for the trip, but in the frigid darkness, there aren't that many people walking. so i don't have to swerve too often. i arrive in surprising time, with minutes to spare until the class is meant to start. find the room and slump into a chair. chat innanely and not much, scan the paper. 500 more subsaharans jump the fence into spain. in coordinated groups apparently. more invisible front-lines of endless war. and after about twenty-five minutes everyone comes to the same conclusion: s/he is not coming. so we head off. i ride with scott to find a new route home. we pull ourselves up a slick grass hill and find the sun caught like a camera flash to our right. i ride home and head straight for my bed. fucking ridiculous. in good (k)news: yesterday i bought a pair of camouflage chuck taylors. they even have rough, unsealed seams. you know, to give you that, authentic, urban/jungle warrior look. also, i'm going to london for a weekend in november and i found a kid koala gig to go to there. might make up for the two i missed in sydney early in the year...
tomorrow i have my first basque lesson. kind of exciting. basque is one of the most raggedly sexy languages to look at ever. i actually think it is the original language of punk. which might explain why there are so many punks up here.
that's the name of the subject i'm about to go to. it means learn to paint with oils, more or less. this semester i'm looking at taking totally random subjects (though painting isn't that random, more a re-acquaintance with a high-school love). other subjects i'm tossing up between, are:
astronomy
mathematical problems and games (a subject about maths and problem-solving where the only prerequisite is that you don't study engineering.
one about the elaboration of wine
and maybe one or two others that i can't remember.
the last possibility is that i will start learning basque, though i may also do that through free community classes.
saw this film last night. will write some but lost force of conviction.
we're in one of the basque bars quite late last night, a fair way in, and she leans over to me with that casual, long neck that bars and beers make, and asks: ¿cuántos años te he dicho que tengo? [how old did i tell you i was]
i burst out laughing, i tell her that she told me 23, and that we can stick with that for the moment. wonderfully blatant.
i think the bike has been named. it shall be called gertrude gac. i like gertrude because i can also then call it trudy/i. it's multipurpose really.
so my copy of a thousand plateaus finally arrived. which is a relief, because now i can get down to pretending to read it. i've been waiting to pretend to do that now for ages.
birthday packages still yet to arrive.
this week has been all about playing the host. first kim got back to pamplona, and spent a couple of days crashing at mine. then, as if tag-teaming, dagny, the german/australian new uts one who i used to have coffees with during spanish breaks crashed a couple of nights. then dash, fresh from the occupied village where he spent his summer, and freshly shaven (the first time i'd ever seen it) arrived to crash last night. so yes, there's been a lot of 'crashing'.
good news is that i finally got my bike. it's a gac mobylette. which, after some quick google research, is some local bike company from the municipal of eibar. it's a folding bike. as in, if it wasn't so old and stiff, i could fold the frame in half. to save space or something i suppose.
still haven't named it yet. i felt that gladys seemed quite appropriate, but boy, you should have seen some of the reactions i got to that one! dash says it's just got to be gac. which strikes me as kind of violent. suggestions are welcome.
in spain, they usually smoke hashish, not weed. that's because it all comes straight in from morroco. hashish is generally much weaker than that weed that i seem to fall victim to whenever i accept a couple of drags on a joint in sydney. so because of this i've never really been stoned yet in spain. which for me is a good thing. generally, i don't like getting wasted on weed. most people know this about me. so the other night i was sitting around with my new flatmates and the neighbours from upstairs with the sexy hair, and when they finally managed to score like three joints worth of weed, when a joint was passed to me. i accepted, and had a few drags. i had a few drags more than i usually would, i think because i was worried that it might never get back to me.
ten minutes laters of course i was completely fumado (past participle of to smoke). i understood conversation only in ten second blocks, but nothing before and nothing after. i was in goldfish mode. and every five mintues i would tell myself, damn! you're wasted. but it's ok, you've recognised it, now you can straighten out. about eight hours later i think i finally did. the rest of the time i sat on the sofa thinking: please noone talk to me, please. because i discovered that night that though speaking spanish drunk is the easiest thing in the world, speaking spanish stoned is completely out of my capabilities. my tongue was fat like something made for the deep south. definitely not the rapid acrobatics of spanish. at one stage i tried to explain that eternal sunshine of the spotless mind was written by the same guy who wrote being john malkovich and adaptation. well, that took a god ten minutes. and came out stuttered and englishy. and afterwards i retracted into myself hoping like fuck that i could just avoid every other question for the rest of the night. which i just about managed to do. just about.
alba
another skinny white boy
antipopper
asti
english lessons
hon
no se puede
somnambulist
today
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