Have a Happy Happy Ununbirthday

Location: Madrid, Spain

Thursday June 17, 2010

I love doing free things like checking out the photo galleries of PhotoEspaña. It reminds me of what @sushimonkey and I would be doing back in Portland: finding random things to go to and new sights to see. And when is a better time to do it then on the day when I only have one class in the morning? Lauren and I visited the BBVA gallery, an exhibition room on the first floor of skyscraper, to see Harold Edgerton’s Anatomía del Movimento (Anatomy of Movement) exhibit.

An American photographer, who experimented with different types of speed photography during the twentieth century, Edgerton (1903-1990) had some pretty sweet photos on display. He created crazy photos by breaking down and looking at everyday things in totally different ways with his high-speed photography. In his laboratory (not his studio, mind you, his la-BOHR-a-tor-ee), he shot CSI-esque pictures of speeding bullets shredding into objects in the early/mid-1900s. There were funny impact photos of the exact moment when a football (Americano) player makes contact with the ball with his foot during a kick. His cameras were able to capture pictures to the hundredth of a second to create futurist photos in which I could trace the path of a ping pong ball during a volley or the shape of a diver as he twists and slips into the water. I also greatly enjoyed the documentary video of Edgerton at work in his laboratory that explained many of his experiments. It was narrated by a guy with that fifties announcer voice. I have to say, that voice is my favorite! The world would be such a better place if more people spoke like that! I felt like a little kid at OMSI for the first time as I watched the film.

We then went to a group exhibition, entitled Profecías (Prophecies), a handful of metro stops away at Museo de la Ciudad. The exhibition featured landscapes and stills from the Photography Collection of Fondo Fotográfico Universidad de Navarra. Various photographers reimaged real-life images by altering the images with CGI. One made pictures of the Alhambra into a collage, slicing together indoor and outdoor scenes. Another photographer created imaginary images on the computer that were inspired by real photos of landscapes.

My family nicely waited for me to have lunch, even though I told them they could eat ahead of me, because I was going to get back thirty minutes after our usual lunchtime. They insisted on waiting, because when I lifted up my napkin at the lunch table, two small presents (a fan and a necklace) were sitting there. It was the sweetest thing ever, because I had briefly mentioned in passing that my birthday was on the seventeenth when I arrived in Madrid at the end of May. It was also literally the sweetest lunch we’ve had, because Carmen brought out chocolate truffles with a lit candle for dessert, and we always only have fruit for dessert on regular days. Miguel and I attacked the candied orange slices dipped in dark chocolate. Nomnomnomz!

Feeling the gallery urge again, I visited a group exhibition, Entretiempos: Instantes, Intervalos, Duraciones (Between Times: Instants, Intervals, Duration) at Teatro Fernán Gomez and Isabel Muñoz’s El Amor y el Éxtasis (Love and Ecstasy) at Comunidad de Madrid after Lauren and I finished a liquor-run in preparation for that night (€5 rum! €1 box sangria!). The Entretiempos exhibit was very art art art: look at me, I’m being artsy by taking strange photos. I mean, there was a photo of a young woman in a short floral dress lying on her back with her legs sticking straight up in the air and blue and white tea cups balanced on the bottom of her wedges as her feet were flexed.

I absolutely loved Muñoz’s exhibition. Set in an old hollow mill-like building (sans the windmill, her huge vibrantly coloured photographs were hung on the round walls, telling a chronological story to the viewer as he climbs the dark metal staircase in the center of the building. Muñoz is the first nonbeliever to take photos of Sufism and Sufists during their ceremonies. The first floor depicted men thrashing their long dark hair in religious fervor as they headbang their way into a trance. The second floor showed grisly images of the believers’ acts of self or group-assisted mutilation, of which subjects were not supposed to feel because of their separation from their visible body and their close proximity to Allah. Swords cut into chests. Metal pokers went through cheeks and jaws. Knives stabbed into heads. There was a beautifully composed photo of hands gently holding up the leg of a companion whose foot was being delicately stabbed with a shiny dagger. Such grace. On the same floor, videos of the ceremonies played on screens that were visible through slits in the walls, illustrating Muñoz’s and our feeling as outsiders as we observe these ceremonies that we can’t understand. On the third floor, Muñoz potrayed images of whirling dervishes in all-white or all-red dress-like wear, increasing in speed until they reached self-transcendence. A projection of a spinning figure in bird’s-eye view turned without stop on the round sloped-in ceiling. A small flight of stairs climbed over that ceiling into a large, white vaulted space at the top of the mill. Dark-blue cushions and pillows lined the circumference of this top floor so that viewers could lie down to watch the collaged video of dervishes twirling to religious chanting. It was so trippy… and would’ve been even trippier if acid was involved in the equation.

That night, we pregamed at Melissa Moon’s place with total bitch drinks… the rum and juice probably tasted so delicious, because there really wasn’t the 30% of alcohol in the rum as the bottled had promised. Haha… Regardless, after an hour, we were happy enough to head over to Kapital, where we would meet basically 99.9% of the IES program. Some people had bunches of cards from their club promoter friends, so everyone got into the 7-floor club for free. It wasn’t mad awkward at 12:30, because most people were hanging out on the top floor that had automated sliding ceilings that opened up to the night sky. People lounged around, drinking, and looking silly in the free shit Dewar’s was giving out to promote their new White Label whiskey. In their clubbing clothes, people wore red fedoras and red sunglasses and took free t-shirts. John G. corsaged me with a giant red flower (on a hair tie) for my birthday, and Patrick was kind enough to hang onto my free t-shirt, which I highly doubted that he was going to be able to do the entire night, but he pulled through!

Speaking of free things, we got free –okay well, stolen—whiskey from the bar thanks to Alex’s nimble Romanian fingers. Many of the IES kids already had glasses from drinks at the bar, so we all secretly passed around the whisky and killed that handle quite quickly. Patrick’s cousin, who’s in Madrid for an internship, was not so lucky with his “borrowed” bottle from the bar. A server discovered it and took it away, saying that if a bouncer saw, Patrick’s cousin would be thrown out onto the street. It was probably for the better, because the IES kids were doing pretty well for itself at that point. With our liquid courage, we took over the second-floor karaoke bar to “sing” songs like “Say My Name,” “Hit Me Baby One More Time,” and “Lady Marmalade.” I’m sure the Spaniards appreciated all the loud drunk Americans.

Actually they did enjoy seeing drunken Americans. Both Alex and Nikita had a bit too much after killing that whiskey straight in too little amount of time. While Nikita was stuck in the bathroom for the rest of the night, Alex passed out with his head back in a white chair on the second-floor near the stairs (read: high traffic area since everyone has to go from one floor to another). He became quite the tourist attraction with his comical mouth gaping open and his red Dewar’s sunglasses. I even did the honors of being photographer for groups who wanted group photos with him. He was so The Hangover credit-worthy. Haha!

Those who were conscious danced on the first-floor’s large dance floor that was complete with awkward go-go dancers (like Barcelona’s Catwalk) who were dancing too slowly to the pumping European techno/house music that was blaring through the sound system. I didn’t enjoy the Modern Love-type music as much as I did being power-hosed down by the stage-smoke that was sporadically and violently vomited from the ceiling. Admittedly, I enjoyed dancing the American music more on the third-floor, where a smaller dance floor, surrounded by lounge areas, played American songs like “Rude Boy.” The survivors who were left stayed here and danced until the club closed at 5:30 am.

Lauren and I decided to wait for the metro to open since the first train starts bright and early at 6:00. As we were sitting by the metro station, a drunken twenty-something Spaniard came over to talk to us. She wanted to practice her English, because we would talk to her in Spanish or English and she would try to reply in English. We found that she was a nursing student at Complutense near the IES Centre. She had a big drunk craving for bocadillo de calamares from Brillantes, so she kept telling us that we should all go together to go get some, telling us to blow off the Valencia meet-up we had to rush to once the metro opened. Her group of girl friends that was just a few paces away kept going about their business and didn’t respond much when she kept yelling at them to get bocadillo de calamares. Perhaps this was just something she did every night? She came up with crazy plans to get Brillantes to open to serve her a bocadillo. One such plan was for us to cut down a branch from the large tree under which we sat and use the branch as a battling ram to force ourselves into the closed restaurant and to threaten the owners to cook us calamares. I would’ve actually been up for it if we could get the sub sandwiches within ten minutes and if I wasn’t so god damn thirsty. Bocadillo de calamares just sounded like the driest food at the moment. Lauren told her she wasn’t hungry at all and didn’t have enough money. The girl proceeded to yell at her in a friendly way, asking her why in the world would she have to pay if she was inviting us. But in the end, she let us go down into the metro without forgetting to give us a round of salutatory high-fives (another thing she kept doing during our conversation).

We finally arrived at Principé Pío at 6:30, after listening to still-drunk Spaniards sing rounds of “Row, row, row your boat” on the metro platform. Lauren and I were cutting it pretty close since our meet-up time to head over to Valencia was at 7:15. I power-walked in my printed dress and heels with Lauren at full stride (she has much longer legs) down Avenida Valladolid, making it back to my house in record time. It’s amazing what über-exaggerated arm-pumping will do to your overall speed. I threw on clothes that I had set out in preparation for the quick change and grabbed my already packed backpack. Within a few minutes, I was receiving farewell kisses from Carmen at the door (she’s a superlight sleeper, so she sweetly woke up to see me off). I even ran to catch the 46 to the IES Centre, arriving at 7:05, with ten minutes to spare.