The tourists won't ever have a clue, but when one settles somewhere... the deep formative wallpaper of the soul slowly pastes itself up.

I think of the vast sideless history of every immigrant who leaves so much to find themselves wholly unreflected in the land of their new home.

Yesterday, a conference about immigration issues in Spain. Only one African among hundreds of Spanish people. The camera asked him: but where are all the immigrants?

They are working, he said, they have to work and they cannot leave their jobs for something like this.

You and I inhabit cracks in the world-true, we got there by means of much privilege, but that doesn't mean these aren't fissures in which we live.

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Public life in Spain is overwhelmingly Spanish. The capital city, Madrid, is overwhelmingly Spanish-much more Spanish than Paris is French. If you want non-Spanish food, you need to either search hard or pay very high prices. If you want to hear non-Spanish music, forget it. Etc etc etc. The list goes on, and these are just some obvious outer manifestations of what I'm getting at. A German described his impressions of Madrid from his visit in the late '80s: like East Berlin before the Wall fell. That kind of heaviness.
Black, African, and Arabic cultures don't really exist here-it's all too new to Madrid; Franco did a good job of keeping the undesirables out. Creative rends in the social fabric should be possible, but Madrid is content to be very Spanish. It's a culture that changes slowly, and people rarely move far from home. Musically, this means that one club dedicates itself to world music but there are no experimental or alternative record shops or performance venues whatsoever, no space on the radio dial where you can find sounds other than Spanish and American pop, and European classical. The dominant form of electronic music is 'bakalao' (literally, "cod")-Eurotechno made to keep people dancing, drinking, taking pills.

Last week I was playing some music for a friend, and her roommate was like, 'wow, and i thought i was extreme.' Kinda funny, kinda true... I often get the impression that all kinds of crazy activity is about to happen in Madrid-that in a city with such narrow manifestations of cultural possibilities, people would flip when they saw a well-conceived alternative--but then I just think that not enough elements are yet in place for that to happen, not yet. I've certainly looked, and come across some very cool things, but more ill-conceived ones than anything else.

Obviously I don't need to be around sameness (how droll) but part of me needs to live in a city that I regard as a city, a multilayered, striated entity that contradicts and affirms its plural self, that breathes with many lungs... Like and un-

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They call: you answer, call back.

Home when the voices lose their accents.
In twenty years the only people speaking flawless English will be German.


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A letter in the mail has my name; it reminds me that I exist.

I exist, simply, and this is a grand damn gift to the wayward immigrant in perpetual fear of disappearing against the hard still backdrop of a foreign culture that interprets him or her as a foreign object.
I think that most people in the world don't believe that other people exist, at least the way they do. I know for a fact that Americans feel this way about the rest of the world; the thesis may be harder to apply in countries and adjacent territories where the people basically look and act the same (Hutus and Tutsis, 'ethnic' Albanians who happen to be lifelong citizens of that country Greece doesn't believe in--Macedonia--and their 'slavic' Macedonians counterparts, Indians and Pakistanis, the various subnational ethnic groups that continue to define Afghanistan's warswept terrain) except for their intense violence against each other provoked, on occasion, by differing convictions on spiritual matters. Not the least of which is what happens when one dies i.e. when the aforementioned intense violence wrecks you beyond belief.
Maybe not believing in people you can't see is good, though. Keeps customs local. Relentlessly exported Hollywood will ensure that nobody remembers 'real' in a few decades time anyhow, so there's no real worry.
This is the 21st century. Jim Carrey is not the only nigger.

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Playing back a song you knew and it is slower than you imagined.

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At night you'll hear the young motorbike boys-out of love wherever they are-who have unwrenched their mufflers for a louder sound.

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Yesterday I was in Barcelona. You would like it there, I think. I say that because I know I did. Very very different from Madrid-and the language is where you find it first. Although Spanish is the unofficial official language, Catalan is the one many folks think in and subsequently hold dear to their hearts. What this means is that most of the Spanish is spoken by people who inhabit the tongue but do not own it. This difference means the world-

Not bogged down by a plentiful and vast central power or thinking, it is shoved up to the north, against the sea and France. A port. Easier to imagine Europe and the world and your self being relevant to it. Easier too, to flinch into the dusty crutch of regional identity, to blame the outsider for being on your insides, to speak only one's own tongue, to close one's mouth-protest votes against polyglot living.

Part of the joy of any good city is a certain amount of exuberant maplessness. The sensation that many differing layers of people and cultures are cohabiting and creating an open civic space and unique local culture that anyone willing to watch and listen and participate can enjoy. You know what I mean?
The sensation that Barcelona is more unhinged than Madrid, that the monolinguistic dominance of the center reflects a sort of land-locked, culture-locked mentality; Madrid's a great place to be, and in fact it's sense of place is incredibly specific for a major capital city, but if you judged ill winds and cross-pollination ...

- by Jace Clayton
http://www.negrophonic.com