A week from now, I'll be shoving the last of my stuff into a suitcase, giving the plants a good soaking, running through my checklist, and schlepping out to catch a plane to Barcelona. Woohoo! I am, in my head, as the old Eagles song goes, "Already Gone." I have been gone for at least a week now, gone, maybe, since I quit my job. I'm strangely unpanicked about the cost and focused intently on how much I'm going to enjoy myself. I refuse to stress about anything, though I've been slowly making preparations (photocopying the passport and credit cards, notifying the bank, ordering stuff I'll need like adapters). I picked up my new glasses, which are going to take a little time to get used to and are currently making my eyes water, and I got my hair cut today.
I'm also slowly immersing myself in things Barcelona. I started the biography of Gaudi I bought ages ago, and bought my own copy of Shadow of the Wind, which I read when it first came out in a library copy. Like most writers, places get associated with books, or books get associated with places for me. The Penguin volume of Samuel Delaney's Dhalgren is inextricably linked to Covent Garden, which is where I bought my first copy in the Penguin shop on my first foray abroad. And London will always be the city of Sherlock Holmes and Peter Wimsey for me. New York, metamorphic and metaphorical as it is, has become a mix of Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale, which drove me here as much as reading James Leo Herlihy's Season of the Witch did when I read it in the early 70s; Jack Finney's Time and Again, which I read my first week here, in a bare apartment; and Archie Goodwin's New York of 30s and 40s from Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe mysteries. Now that I've bought five thousand guidebooks to the city, I'd like to be reminded of it through fiction (thought Shadow of the Wind is set in the years after the end of WWII).
And today, after getting my hairs cut and having sushi with Dr. Em at Amber, we (Dr. Em, and my hairs and I, and the sushi, sort of) wandered over to the Met for Barcelona and Modernity: Gaudi to Dali. This turned out to be a great way to whet my appetite for what I'm afraid is going to a place I'll hate to leave. The show is wonderful, if you're thinking about going, though it was packed today and there was a lot of jockeying for position in front of everything. The first thing you see is this huge photo of Sagrada Familia, which looks to me like it was grown, rather than built, as though it were a genetic engineering experiment from a science fiction novel. From there, you progress through three separate movements of art over a period of about 50 years and including painting, architecture, and design, with some excursions into print as well. The usual suspects include Gaudi, Miro, Picasso (too many), and Dali (not enough), as well as others I wasn't at all familiar with, including Ramon Casas, whose painting I like very much. The show's very well organized, more by topic than movement, and covers a broad range of media. I highly recommend it. But there were parts of the architecture exhibit that I glossed over because I want to see them fresh next week.
Why is it that there are never postcards of the pictures and objects I'm particularly drawn to in a show? There was one painting by Joaquim Mir called "Rock in a Pool" that was just stunning, and another by Casas called "The Garroting" that I just wanted to stand and study for hours, but the only postcards or posters were of works by Miro, Picasso, or Casas—and the one Casas I didn't like all that well. The jewelry they were selling was mind-bogglingly beautiful (and expensive) though, and so were the tile coasters by Gaudi, which they were selling for $20/ea or $100 for 6. Both Dr. Em and I thought this was a little excessive, even for the Met, which is now a suggested admission of $20. Considering how packed the place was I'm not feeling too sorry for them. So Dr. Em bought a postcard and I bought a copy of Robert Hughes's Barcelona the Great Enchantress, which came out a couple of years ago. This show will be a big boon to his sales, I imagine. I may get the longer version of his history of the city when I get back.
On a side note that's almost completely irrelevant, I kept looking at the bicycle advert posters and thinking how symbolic they were of the nascent suffrage movement, giving women a new freedom from their clothing and a new literal mobility they hadn't had before. Maybe that's why I have a fondness for the turn-of-the-century bicycle posters. Free association at work
We made the mistake of wandering into the Tiffany exhibit next door afterwards, which looked sadly kitschy somehow next to all that Catalan earnestness and gravitas, though as I pointed out to a cranky, uncaffeinated Dr. Em, it's not really fair to compare one man's personal taste in decorating to a collection of multiple artists and movements in another country spanning something like 50 years, even if they were roughly contemporary. The magnolia and wisteria windows alone were worth view, and his watercolors and paintings, though they were all very sort of Pre-Raphaelite, which doesn't hold up well against the likes of Guernica. And Dr. Em took me to tea in the sculpture garden cafe, capping the day off nicely.
Everything I learn about Barcelona points to it being astonishingly beautiful in both color and form. I'm trying not to build it up too much in my own head and court disappointment, but somehow I don't think that's going to be a problem.
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