I was fever ill yesterday. Luckily it was a day off. Went to the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum, which I'd never seen, and began loosing my appetite. By the end I felt strangely drained and exhausted, so I returned by subway to the hotel. Huge signs erected by the city thanked the citizens of Madrid in the wake of the recent train bombing.
The museum begins with 2 sets of full-length giant portraits of Baron Thyssen and his wife - like a supersized version of people out of Dallas or Hello magazine. She with her little fluffy white dog at her ankles. The only other painting in the room is Tinteretto's giant picture of paradise, a celestial human traffic jam.
All night I shiver and moan and try to eat some dinner but throw it up later and lie on the bathroom floor near the porcelain temple, where the marble is nice and cool.
The papers carry images of the American contractors who were dragged from their car in Iraq and set alight, hacked up and strung up from a bridge while men waved victory signs. I stare at the image of a charred human - not something you see every day, and not likely to see this in the U.S. press. It's really meat - like a weird roast pig. A bone protrudes from a leg bent round the wrong way, as if the barbecue chef was drunk.
Morning, I'm drained but feeling no aches and shivers.
Debbie and I discuss upcoming press and the U.S. tour - and then Iraq - over a breakfast meeting. Both of us are shocked that Americans cannot see the invasion as one nation simply invading another sovereign nation and demanding to install a puppet regime and control the largest oil fields in the world. The nerve and hubris are unbelievable. Imagine if someone did this to the U.S. We are sure that Europe will not allow the U.S. to simply commandeer these huge oil fields. How can the U.S. extricate itself now? Debbie suggests that the U.S. simply leave and make a deal to allow the UN to take charge, but I point out that the UN is considered an enemy too, and they don't exactly owe the U.S. any favors. What a mess!
I surmise that soon enough the insurrectionists will find a way to breach the walls and defenses of the U.S. compound from which Bremmer tells the press that progress is being made (as he stands surrounded by machine gun toting guards). Either it will happen by rocket or some other means - and then the death toll will rocket up and all hell will break loose. El Mundo reports that there are around 10,000 Iraqi missing- most presumed dead, killed by U.S. forces. The Independent reports that the U.S. as a matter of course does not count Iraqi dead (!)
Email and calls re: a L'Oumo Vogue shoot - which is in NY and is nice to be offered. But having just recently been on the bathroom floor and still feeling kind of out-of-shape flabby from the last year's trails I hardly feel like a glamorous guy.
I received numerous Emails requesting we NOT play in the Madrid venue I was in last time - the Riviera, a giant disco on some industrial land near the river with fake palm trees inside. My Madrileños pals all said "please, no"
So I was disheartened to see that after playing some of the loveliest little jewel theaters around Spain we're now in a huge disco again, this time with an adjacent indoor swimming pool. Hence the name Divino Aqualung.
The place is littered with heavy metal band stickers, disco vari lights, and the staff are listless and careless. The skinny guy they've hired for security is terrified that he'll have to actually stop someone from entering, so he lurks in the shadows.
I suspect my audience will not come to this place, and, here in the national media center in front of my friends whom I wanted to impress, I will play to a bunch of ex-pat stragglers.
The record company reps turn up a half hour before show time. I suspect they're not staying for the whole set, if they even stay for the show. (I bid them enjoy the show and I catch the guilty looks on their faces.)
In the end, though, I sort of have to eat my words - the crowd is standing, attentive, and, by the end, wildly enthusiastic, as only the Spanish and Mancunians can be. We all are pleased.
My pals come back afterward. They seemed to have had a good time. Pablo has just directed a film in Zahara, the place where we all used to go in the summer, called "Tuna and Chocolate" ("chocolate" being slang for hash); so much of the income of the locals is now about smuggled North African hash. You can see Morocco from Zahara. The poster is to be of Pablo kissing a tuna fish. He gives me a worn beach shell. I recognize its shape immediately - it's from Zahara.
On the bus to Lisboa some of us sit around the table while Mauro plays songs by Jackson do Pandeiro. One beautiful melodic song is about the virtues of quail eggs (for a man). Another is about Pele.
There's a story about Pele that at a press conference he was asked to make a statement to the English language press and, as his language skills were limited, he simply said "love, love, love." Nothing more.
