TRAVEL DIARY

A weblog regularly updated by Jodi Rose.

  

VIEWING ALL POSTS FOR: AUGUST 2007

Thursday, August 30, 2007

12:32 AM
Posted by jodi rose

so,my first thought is, what kind of bridge would it take to get across a hole of a billions years? something in an alternate dimension perhaps, or sub-atomic, those tricky virtual particles could flicker over it, or maybe we might finally learn the secret of the tesseract. (Madelein L'Engle 'A Wrinke in Time') Since it's also 6-10 billion light years away, I guess a bridge across the void isn't going to be a huge problem in the near future. I loved the scientists explanation of how he stumbled across it using radio astronomy: "One morning I was a little bored, and said, 'why don't I look in the direction of the WMAP cold spot'," says Rudnick.

It's amazing what a slow morning can turn up...

I've taken to wandering through the park at the end of my street - parc de la ciutadella - which has the most magnificent ornate fountain statuary I've ever seen. Bronze horses, venus AND aphrodite, numerous cupids, stone horses, cascading waterfalls of greenery, and the final touch - DRAGONS! Yes, I stumbled across them by surprise on an evening walk last week, and was completely enchanted. Spurting water instead of fire, they lean forward towards the old town, with a sense of grace, intensity and power. Marvelous scaly tails.

The visit to Montserrat last week took Philippa and I to the edge of the vortex - in fact, she almost fell in. There's definitely something going on here. Then I had a fabulous international artstar moment of glamour involving a champagne picnic on the costa brava. Waited for a shiny speedboat or polished skiff to pick me up, but had to go back to the city and get on with life. No running away anymore.

That's right, we're back on track, in business, mojo, and every other cliche you can think of to signify the end of a period of anxious not entirely aimless wandering. Ready to settle down and make some art.
Had a lovely evening upstairs with john and kim, ended with inspiring discussion about making images and had to scribble ideas on a piece of printing paper, so they don't dissolve into the night. All so clear in my mind, let's see how the process of translation goes.

Another trip to the completely insane Encants flea market today, where you have to sift through mountains of polyester to find a gem or two - but all only '1 euro! 1 euro!' So that's the only shopping I'm doing here... not having the budget for shoes or even the sales.

Still, getting used to living with what I actually need - which isn't much - and enjoying the change of scene and company. Time to water the plants, only one has succumbed to the heat in a month. We even survived the electrical fire in the building, but now have no lights on the stairs. Finally have a use for that torch in my mobile phone. That's it's one gizmo, apart from calls and text messages. So retro.

Almost time to be moving on again. A few days now, and back to Berlin. Welcoming the lollyboys home tomorrow, then a lush friday and that's it for this Barcelona sojourn. It's been productive, after all.

Thursday, August 9, 2007

6:45 PM
Posted by jodi rose

I went to the cccb last night for their free cinema program, all on the theme of traveling. perfect. Got there early enough for a deckchair, and read my book until the films started. This one was particularly intriguing, a reality style doco by artist sophie calle and her then partner driving across america as their relationship disintegrated. 'no sex last night' was her constant refrain, although with a twist at the end involving a drive-thru chapel in las vegas. incredibly honest, intimate portrait of all the ambiguity and uncertainty floating beneath the surface of a relationship, in counterpoint to their actual conversations, power struggles and endless stops at roadside mechanics. the complete change that comes over her towards the end was astonishing, and her desire for that transformation so raw it was almost painful to watch. It made me realise how much we carry these unconscious urges with us in everyday life, and only sometimes let them surface in bizarre choices or unpredictable actions.

"The unexpected disadvantage of modern life is our victory over our own fates. We're called on to decide so much, almost everything, and we're thoroughly informed about repurcussions" *

Then again, my life is bizarre and unpredictable at the best of times. Feeling a little like i'm inside a pinball machine, richocheting across europe at the whim of some teenageer in control of the flipper. It's less drifting than a chaotic zigzag with a slow final roll towards the inevitable end game. Washed up on the beach in barcelona, cocktail in hand, watching the bodies seethe around me to disco music in the sand, seeming to have lost the thread of whatever impulse it was that carried me here. That's fine, maybe it's best to drift for a while.

"By nightfall, when we stopped at a motel in Indiana, we had all but lost track of our histories and futures - it seemed we had always been driving across a vast table of farmland and would always continue doing so. That is both the horror and the marvel of long travel. You lose track of your life with astonishing speed" *p248

I'm drifting. I'm a drifter. A while longer. Adrift but still afloat, simply drifting in the currents. Not lost. I have a home, many homes.

"Something was wrong with me. I lacked some central ability to connect... first you felt a floating sensation, as if your hours didn't add up to whole days, and your presence - in an airplane, on the streets - didn't affect the landscape as human presences ordinarily did' * p184

I still feel that disconnect, more now than before.

I have nothing to anchor me. It's a choice, but before you realise it the freedom of endless possibilities starts to look like a lot of hard work. The desire to sink down into a comfortable, familiar place becomes stronger every day. Suddenly uprooting yourself - again and again and again - is, I suppose, quite a strange thing to do. Not that many people can manage it, and survive, or stay sane. There are no guarantees that I have. But, like everyone, I develop strategies to make it through the day. Reading or making notes in a favourite cafe, stopping by the cathedral to hear the organ music playing - it sounded like a movie theme this afternoon, something starring bette midler with a swelling emotional climax, that or a coffee ad in the rush of an African waterfall - buying fizzy blood orange drink to mix with vodka and campari... all the manifestations of civilisation to keep the wilderness and haunting demons away.

"Perhaps we don't fully recover from our first loves. Perhaps, in the extravagance of youth, we give away our devotions easily and all but arbitrarily, on the mistaken assumption that we will always have more to give" * p246

Seeing the ongoing negotations between sophie and her lover, and reading this novel of open ended beginnings and sudden random disappearings, it seems that the things people use to tie themselves into their lives are no less arbitrary and tenuous than my constant floating. The effect of what anchors us is only as strong as our belief in it, without that, we can all float away on a light summer breeze. I want to stay. Somewhere. To be needed. To feel the force of someones love that is stronger than my impulse to disconnect, and remain free. I need to keep believing that it is possible. Despite all evidence to the contrary. Despite what the newspapers say, in their articles about loneliness and shopping addiction and infidelity and the inability to hold onto each other with any conviction or substance.

I give my devotion to a sweet smile here, a pair of sad dark eyes there. Maybe it is simply the act of committing yourself to a place, or a person, which gives the energy to developing constancy. Or is it simply an accumulation of days, weeks, years and the negation of will, the not making a choice, which brings permanence? I can't live like that, it's always been a problem. It has to feel real, and passionate or I just won't do it. Is it reasonable to expect such vitality and vibrant life in the everyday? I don't really care anymore. If you really want things to change, you need to make up new dreams, imagine a new life, and choose to create something else.

That moment when you finally catch up with yourself and stop living in dreams of the future, give in to the energy carrying you along from decisions made in the past, and fully inhabit the present moment. I'm not quite there yet. Or maybe it's been and gone already and I didn't even notice. Pick a number, any number.

* quotes from Michael Cunningham 'a home at the end of the world'

Wednesday, August 8, 2007

6:01 PM
Posted by jodi rose

Spent a few hours in my favourite library cafe getting over the not-entirely unexpected shock of rejection number seven. Still stings though. Trying not to take it all personally, this doesn't mean you're a bad artist or unworthwhile person. It's only a matter of faith.

Had to take my own book, as theirs are, reasonably enough - all in Spanish. Yo La Tengo drifting through the background gave a dreamy quality to the otherwise unremarkable afternoon. Reading 'a home at the end of the world' (michael cunningham) writing so starkly intimate and beautiful, it completely immerses you in his world and lends itself to melancholy. The preface poem takes my breath away every time.

'The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain

There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.

He breathed in its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.

It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go in his own direction,

How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,

For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:

The exact rock where his inexactnesses
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,

Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.'

Wallace Stevens

I am receiving fragments from my dislocated various homes,
missives in envelopes wrapped up in pixels, each on another curving hook that tugs at my heart. Pulling me back, but where? Exactly?
The many inexactnesses of having no clear forward motion are slowly catching up with me. I am constantly displaced, negotiating disorientation. Like one of those hyperactive people who can never sit still, need always to be fidgeting, the dust barely settles around their feet before they spring up again, pacing, urgent, unquiet. I was never like that. I could sit in one place and day dream for hours. It's on a macro-scale this has taken hold. In the tiny moments I am still.

This morning I had to leave the house early, for reasons too bourgeois to mention. Found myself wandering up to the nearest cathedral - Santa Lucia - to visit the geese. I love their walled garden in the centre of the ancient hewn stone arches. Strolled down La Ramblas and was drawn into an exhibition by the name 'silencio cartografias' in the barcelona cultural insitute. The empty landscapes had a stark compelling quiet, and it wasn't until halfway through that I read the information and realised they were all the sites of concentration camps during the Franco years. A male voice intoned Spanish names over video of lonely forests and low stone walls, sometimes one or two and other building to a murmured intensity - these are the unmarked mass graves. The visceral horror of scenes in Pan's Labyrinth came to mind, and made a queasy contrast to the brightly coloured produce and throngs of tourists on the other side of the glass in the boqueria market. Following the hill down through el raval district, I passed a mariners bar with curvy working girl checking her makeup on the corner, then an entire street of hookers and rentboys, leaning comfortably against the walls in their morning chatter. A young Pakistani boy tried to befriend me, he was gentle and sweet, but on asking 'so will you be my friend now' after our two minute introduction, I just couldn't leap that gap of culture and convention.

Slept intermittently through an insane thunderstorm last night, the windows rattled and even the walls seemed to be shaking in response to the vibrations across the heavens. Flashes of lucidity about bridges and the architecture of love, notes waiting to be turned and sifted into something luminous, a river stone from raw words.

'The song says let's be happy, so I was happy. It only makes me sad... Where I belong, where I belong' sing Yo La Tengo.

Monday, August 6, 2007

5:04 PM
Posted by jodi rose

A few inspiring words from Amelia Earhart:


"Adventure is worthwhile in itself.

Flying might not be all plain sailing, but the fun of it is worth the price.

I want to do it because I want to do it.

Obviously I faced the possibility of not returning when first I considered going. Once faced and settled there really wasn't any good reason to refer to it.

The more one does and sees and feels, the more one is able to do, and the more genuine may be one's appreciation of fundamental things like home, and love, and understanding companionship.

The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure , the process is its own reward.

The most effective way to do it, is to do it.

The woman who can create her own job is the woman who will win fame and fortune."

AAAAAAAH YES!!

Sunday, August 5, 2007

10:19 AM
Posted by jodi rose

so, thought I'd better log in and let you know that I haven't fallen under a freight train. Kept wanting to jump on when they stopped outside the house, but as it would only be a few hundred metres or so before going into a factory or warehouse didn't ever work up the energy.

now have swapped the trains rattling past for church bells, on the quarter hour from 7am, courtesy of santa maria of the sea. She has a lovely church, it's the venue de jour for hip young couples to get married in, so we have at least three weddings a day at peak times. wandered in to the end of one, the photoshoot was taking place at the altar, with groom in kilt and bridesmaids all carrying fans to match their dresses. at least two hens nights per bar going on when we ventured out into the evening, with lasses lining up the cheap cocktails and louche english lads lolling about. ended up in a tiny cute bar/cafe/library with the most decadent chocolate brownie nightcap and waiter with the sweetest smile I've seen in a long time.

slowly navigating familiar paths through a new city, although dodging the tourists takes a bit of getting used to, in this ultra groovy old district of barcelona. a small price to pay for having the best fresh icecream downstairs - mango sorbet exactly like frozen mangoes, chocolate completely sublime - barceloneta beach ten minutes away, and all those atmospheric bars and cafes tucked away in a maze of winding cobbled lanes. tommy tracked down the michelin restaurant vanilla slice supplier, after six months of trying to read the address before the savvy barstaff whipped the paper away, and the source is also literally around the corner - vilamala on languelles. delicious.

but it's not all pastries, sun and drinking, have finally clicked into a good work focus and cranking out the words for various proposals, residencies and articles. something about the heat - finally, summer! - is delicious and helps smooth away all those worry lines.

arrived to a beach party with mojitos and swim in the mediterranean at sunset, watching drag queens in purple wig and silver platform dance to the village people - that's going to put a smile on your face.
also finished reading tony hawks' 'playing the moldovans at tennis', which for a completely ludicrous activity (as a bet, to beat the entire moldovan football team at tennis) had a surprising depth and warmth. something about his optimism and sheer cheek, along with very humble and lovely worldview gave the story a lot of humour and humanity, and a very satisfying structure with a sudden twist at the end. Now that's what I need, something finite, not this endless wandering and meandering along different bridges. Just a little bit further now, just one more bridge, a little longer, you'll get there.

Definitely need an end point. A moment when I can go, yes I've done it. This is finished. Still working on that. And in the meantime, Barcelona is calling.