Eating Barcelona, Talking to Heroes, and Photographing Life and Death
How to cope these days
I came to Spain this week in part to see if maybe I could live here. If, finally, it is time to get out of NY, and I could make good on those eight years of Spanish classes, I wonder if this wouldn’t be a nice place to perch for the next however long. While I’ve been here I’ve been in a bit of a delirium (I always think of Pynchon obsessively noting that delirium means to be outside of one’s furrow). And maybe my furrow of late has been traveling within a kind of narrative, butting up against a fantasy (or film) version of a city in order to think about culture or colonialism or whatever the hell it is that I do lol. I don’t have a cultural or cinematic mental map of Madrid. So maybe that’s why I’ve felt a bit adrift or maybe it is, you know, everything.
Yesterday I came to Barcelona, and this city is primarily the domain of Montalbán in my brain. And what his hero Pepe Carvahlo does better even that solve mysteries is eat. So maybe it was inevitable that at a certain point, my searching, sussing, wandering, looking and thinking just turned into eating. And drinking. And thinking about eating and drinking.
Of course one of the great things about traveling solo is that you can go wherever you want whenever you want, and eat what and where you like. But eating alone often means that you spend a lot of time thinking with your food. Maybe thinking about food. And I’ve spent a week staring into plates and glasses thinking myself around the bend (this surprises absolutely no one at this point). Do I eat to escape, to comfort, to indulge, to understand something about where I am, to nourish, to destroy, to hide, to engage? Probably yes. I’ve written a lot, too much (to excess, like the way I eat, and then don’t eat) about food and eating and even cooking, but is there anything else that we do every day, that can bring us such joy, can inform us, change us, fundamentally, can transport us, fuel us, ruin us, inspire us and build a bridge out of our tiny personal caves into the lives and realities of others the way food can? I dunno, maybe some day I’ll feel more balanced or at ease with food, maybe not, such is life. I have had the absolute best time eating and drinking around Spain and now need to get myself to Lanserhof or something to atone.
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Weirdly I’ve been thinking a lot about interviews recently. Interviewing people. Whether it might be something to do again, on here or elsewhere. It is something I used to do an awful lot of and got to where I thought I was pretty good at it (looking back I’m not so sure). At the heaviest point, about midway through my time at Interview magazine I was doing these huge 5000 word conversations with these icons of the time, personal heroes of mine, mostly. Chomsky, Umberto Eco, Oliver Stone. While also doing a podcast, with people we couldn’t photograph, largely. Paul Thomas Anderson, Anjelica Huston, Allan Moore, Adam Phillips, Jim Harrison, Sam Shepard. I was also helping to put together the rest of the magazine, too, lol. But I prepared for each of these conversations like, I don’t know, a doctoral student (and I think I was maybe a little overly serious in result, lacking some of the wit and grace and nimbleness that makes for a good conversation, but I dunno). I mention the heroes bit because a lot of what was going on here, for me, was a kind of advice seeking. I’ve been a feckless hunter after father figures my whole life and interviewing cultural giants was maybe the most formalized version of that. Asking Sam Shepard how to be. Looking to Rick Owens for guidance. To Jim Harrison for moral support. It is all quite apparent in the pieces that I who was not at all sure of my own identity was trying to fit my way into the other guys’s suit, as Andrew Wylie described his efforts at Interviewing in the 1970s. The joke here is that Wylie says this in an interview with David Marchese who is famous for, in not interviewing with the opposite intentions, than for at least giving famous people enough rope to hang themselves in almost every outing. Anyway I really dug Wylie’s characterization of himself as a hollow man. It is always nice when you hear articulated something you were afraid might be something only you feel.
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Obviously that is a lot of the reason for art and storytelling in our lives, to help us understand feelings we don’t yet have language for, to help us recognize ourselves in others, in the world, and to give us an experience outside of our own limited reach. Even when that extended perspective is absolutely unbearable. There is a devastating opinion piece in the Times today about a particular photograph of lifeless children in Gaza that cracks this point open into all sort of dimensions. Like just about everything else these days it really poignantly wonders what use our work, or every waking moment.
On the opposite pole of the same spectrum I guess are the images that Jack Davison took for the Belmond hotel on the Riviera Maya. What Davison does (from portraits of actors for the Times to a recent fashion editorial inspired by Calder’s circus) is always arresting, crunching reality into fun, fuzzy abstractions, but this series lit my hair on fire. Maybe because, selfishly, I see what I do as at least conceptually in the same ballpark as these (taking pictures at pretty places) but simply could not get my head around how Davison constructed these moments and then realized them — a woman walking into a brilliant aquamarine wave with a tray of Mexican glass cups; fruit raining down, or appearing to rain upward toward a palm tree; another maybe same woman in almost dagguerotype portrait as she does a little sufi swirl). They are wonderful and immediately washed my brain of cynicism. How can you look at them and doubt how important beauty and escapism and dreamy romance is. Anyway happy Monday. Xoxo
Ran across this yesterday at the Musée de Luxembourg. "And identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself." G. Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography 1937