Grotesque Dali

Up in Figueres, the Dali museum, one of the biggest tourist attractions of the region, is by turns nauseating, funny and grotesque. An explosion of kitsch which  not even its very excess redeems. Down in Pubol, the Gala chateau, with its sweet dead roses smell, the piped in Wagner, the collection of haute couture dresses and other assorted mementos of the high life faux surrealist style stands as another  monument to the cult of personality gone silly. 

It's only rock'n roll

Old for those of us who were young in the 80's, washed up in the 90's, decrepit in the new century, the Rolling Stones are still in there, making faces, making moves, playing their old repertoire as if it was new. Look at Shine a Light: altogether a disastrous movie...even the sound is bad...at the beginning Jagger & Co look like a pastiche of themselves. But as the concert moves along, the power of the music gradually takes over. Those old songs still have the capacity to move you ...and to move them. Gradually a trance like atmosphere is established. The Stones rock. They still do. 

Anachromism

What are Sylvère Lotringer and Antonio Negri, these two post marxist, neo structuralist anachronisms doing in the pages of Art Forum? Still talking about revolution, after all these years? Being nostalgic about May 68? You bet. Negri thinks "it was the beginning of an era, not an ending". "The emancipation of the masses would occur through the shift from paid work to the liberation of work". This is, according to him, "what we need to talk about when we speak of '68". It seems Negri, like the Bourbons, learned nothing and forgot nothing. Still spewing forth the old nonsense, still holding fast to old fashioned obscure social theorizing to justify all the horrid mistakes of his political past. Does Art Forum think it is being modern by opening its pages to these two? Or does it feel that a little overwrought French speculation passing as serious thought is needed to compensate for the ads which fill 90% of its pages and feed the feverish capitalist speculation swirling around the art world?

Meanwhile...

Early in the morning and late at night, I kept on reading the World Crisis, Winston Churchill's account of the First World War, easily the most vivid, eloquent, moving  and penetrating history of that great conflict which I ever read. Much less known than "The Second World War, which won him the Nobel Prize for Literature, it is by far a better book. Whereas the former is (except the first volume, "The Gathering Storm") largely the product of staff work, overloaded with documents and often dull, this is a rolling, majestic, impassioned book, its tone by turns acerbic and heroic, which illuminates and brings to life episodes, characters and moods often described to no effect by plodding academic pens. A devastating indictment of the trench warfare waged on the Western Front, with its mindless offensives costing hundreds of thousands of lives, a spirited defense of the Dardanelles operation which nearly cost him his career, an account of how he invented the tank (he did) and so much more. Long out of print, it has now been republished by Penguin.

The Emporda

The Emporda is the playground of the Catalan bourgeoisie. A pristine landscape, with the Pyrennees in the background and manicured fields with lots of picturesque little villages, each with its own  romanesque church from the XII century. The capital of the Emporda, Girona, is at the crossroads of France and Spain. It is here, back in the XIIIth century that a quite small group of Jewish scholars and wisemen invented the Kaballah. Now Girona is the richest district in Spain, where Catalan nationalism is strongest and the only one where the PP has zero representation.

About this blog

Driving from the Emporda to Barcelona, Cyberiticus decided to share his boring thoughts, experiences, images, musings, reflections and general ill temper with you all, adrift in the cybersphere, who spend idle hours searching the internet. Please feel free to share with him your indignation, boredom, incomprehension or, God forbid, wholehearted agreement with his postings.