Outdoor

Politics may be made up of sensations, but it doesn’t seem sentimental. There is a small loophole in this because we Galicians always think that sentimentality is the opposite of economics, but I see many people who are sentimentally attached to money. This same gap also appears in the political classes because there are many …

Accident

We had an accident with the suitcases. To put it better, the suitcases had an accident on their own and were left dangling in some airport interregnum. We are Europeans without a backpack. We are affected in the domestic comforts. But who protests in the midst of so much lack. We look for supplies and …

Getting here

Niger is suffering from drought and many inequalities. The drought is not new this year. Since the turn of the millennium, the country’s situation has been worsening, with two turning points. The first was in 2003, with a severe drought that reduced the cereal harvests that form the basis of a resource-poor economy. A year …

The last of the last

From time to time it is necessary to declare oneself insubmissive to awards. Of those that are given, of those that are received. We should also declare ourselves insubmissive of protesting against prizes when they are not won and of feeling deeply moved when they are received. Awards, like polls for the political class, should be treated from that middle distance of neither total surrender nor contempt. We pass over the Oscars, over the Maestro Mateo and we stick the flag in that place where perhaps only the last of us are left. It is not a museum.

Tarecos

We are a species stubbornly ignorant of our animal condition. In spite of all the continuous demonstrations of cruelty, fierceness or indifference with as much evil as we let loose every day we set foot on the ground when we wake up. We ignore the animal condition like those who do not want to see the dark side of the moon, like those who decide that the subway can only be used on specific surfaces. We ignore the blood marks we carry on our hands as some companies forget that part of the money they receive comes from public budgets that they systematically discredit. As in conjuring: they make us look at the wrong hand.

City

Miguel Mosquera recapitulates Ourense in Ourense. Between 1980 and 2022, even numbers for an odd situation. He opens the Dodo Dadá gallery with the double meaning of archive and revelation.

Against the elements

It almost always rains. As if the celebration were against the elements. But rain or not, you have to go out. You have to get dressed and warm the milk or warm the milk and get dressed. You have to lower and unharness the cattle and you have to milk them if you have to. …

Good and generous

You have to measure up: the narcissists demand as they make us a suit. We have to measure ourselves: with this strange obsession for comparison. Knowing that no matter what they measure, they always measure themselves and always come out on top. Portraiture is the genre par excellence of the present. But not the psychological …

Flavour policy

Even truly educated people marvel at left-wing governments. Certainly a left-wing government is a marvel because there have been very few left-wing governments in history. Especially of the theoretical left. The political left has as a general framework the idea that governing is right-wing, like commanding, and when they set out to do what the …

Heroes in the Middle of the Mountain

We are always in the middle of the bush. We carry with us the idea that the bush is a barren place and we accept the theory with all the seriousness of consequence, just as we accept that bush is the opposite of home. The bush, we are told, is something else and that is …

Shit here and there

A saying survives in Poland that speaks of the “misery of the Galicians”. It explains the most widespread famine and has its origins in the potato eaters who, in the 19th century, were unable to survive on a menu so lacking in protein. The persistence of the saying and its image has merit because, since …

What comes with us

If we abandon dramatism we will see that we are all more or less the same, that we are more equal than different. Even if some people show off a lot for no reason. There are those who drag their legs and those who carry overtime on their backs. There are those who carry the …

14th February

Every year, it’s the same story. Chopin’s Étude tristesse all day long, so as to commemorate love. Each 14th as if the familiar room were a Parisian lounge of stout but elegant furniture. She suffered without devotion her husband’s characteristic clumsiness. Till the last 13th. She got hold of the Polish composer’s compact disc, interpreted by a Mallorquin, she broke …

9 | Facebook was this

Secret question: Who lives in the pineapple under the sea?Answer: Spongebob SquaremayorI work in the city council, I’m more interested in women than men, I studied in Ourense. And photos, now I should put photos; the one from the posters will do. What are you thinking about? Obviously, I think something and maybe I should …

Inner distance

Finally, the street. It is wide, untidy in shape, dominated by the colour of clay, with some trees, unplaced signs, a crossroads in the background and schoolgirls in blue uniforms. They look curiously at a group that is rather exotic to them and that does not yet understand the power of the sun. Whatever is …

Love Lesson in the time of Parody

I had another title, but the obvious is rather unpleasant. We should be rational and, being rational, we should think that the pandemic will pass but the farce will not. We should be rational, but perhaps we are unable to overcome our animal instincts and can only rationalize up to that point where the voice …

8 | Who has the mic has the power

The mayor asked what to do now with Lucía do Incio. The councillor answered: with potatoes. But the mayor is a documented guy, and he already had a mental organisation for the problem: the TV said she was the first Galician artist to represent Spain in Eurovision, but who pays attention to the TV? The …

Fog of war

Fish don’t know about fog; they don’t even know much about themselves. Fish are locked into their circumstance; they have limited hardware and antiquated software. They don’t see the fog, and if they ever did see it, they would have no memory to recognize it. Fish have something of a Galician voter. There is a …

Disappearenace in the parks

In the roundabout of data, the result of the crossroad between poverty and births appears: 14% of children born in Niger will not see the world as adults. Percentage figures are not always convincing. Let’s shift the focus to absolute figures. 14 out of every 100 children born in Niger will die of sheer hunger. …

The Human Factor

The Last of Us is about to premiere on television and, to recap something, here are two texts about the two editions of the video game that gave rise to the HBO series. There are seven years between them and another ten between the last one and the premiere. Now we will see if it is true that video games and cinema are going to meet.

Full metal jacket

In Galicia, the fight is against the weather. It has always been against the ungovernable elements which, by being so ungovernable, end up governing us. In Galicia, the Kantian imperative is self-protection and, as in war, anything goes. In Galicia, the welfare state means not getting wet.In Galicia, the fight is against the climate, but …

We are getting married!

-Come on, damn it, it could be a joke! How could Rosalía de Castro and Agustín Sixto Seco not get married? She was older than him, of course. But that’s the fun of it. And, besides, she was the daughter of a priest and had no pedigree or anything, that’s frowned upon in Santiago, but …

Before humidity

If you look at the minimal decoration of the Panteón de Gallegos Ilustres, you will have to think that the reception given to the mortal remains of Alfonso Daniel Rodríguez Castelao when returned from Buenos Aires was overacted. With the overacting of converts. With the trademark of knowing that the problem was not what dust …

Ghost or dust

It was all very uncomfortable. And cold. And everything was placed where it could be. Without the dilettante opinion: it looks better against the other wall. Everything was as it could be and there is no vintage varnish that manages to disguise the fact that many of those decisions were not our own. They were …

Properly talking

Lolo appeared one day in the neighbourhood pointing to the sky with a gesture of exaggerated elegance as if he had studied at a priest’s school and had the stands of a headmaster. Lolo, for us, was a bit of a fool. At most, we found him funny or curious or strange. Or simply different. …

Chilhood Equalities

If women give birth a lot, then there must be children. There’s school noise on the other side of the wall and the dust that blows in resembles all the dust that blows in for people who live near a school. We could unload all the clichés about children, about the past and about the …

How the class struggle was lost

It must have been in the mid-1980s when someone with money, entrepreneurial fame and a bit stingy with overtime pay, sentenced on television sets that the proletariat was finished. He meant the social class, but in those years the shoulder pads of American women were so high that they blurred the distinction between thought and language. I meant to say that the proletariat was meaningless, perhaps more: it was out of fashion. Out of time.

Asymmetry

The value of societies is not equal to the sum of the value of their individuals. And from Hari Seldon onwards it has been literarily demonstrated that collective behaviour is more predictable than individual behaviour. Seldon explained that the collective is more predictable than the personal and that is why you can think that Pedro …

Galiza, Galicia, black Galicia

Galicia is a nation without a state of mind. It has two names, no real unanimity and a suicidal tendency to find its reasons for being in the past. From time to time, it assaults itself for some symbolic reason that turns into an identity argument, the dust rises and the idea remains that we are capable of rebelling against the signs but not against reality. We put a lot of effort into the symbolic. Reality is another battle.

Hormones versus neurons (Platero and me)

Pepe Platero had a reputation for being “annoying”, which may be an affectionate or distanced reputation according to whoever pronounces the word. In no case is it defamatory and, perhaps, it can be understood as the dialectical version of being angry. Platero has earned a lot of money and some fame from having worked for …

Daily Mystique

As I decide which standard I should write in, I decide that the 20th century has left many wars and little peace. Some of the peace it has left has to do with the Beatles and that unusual story of making love against the war. If the things George Harrison (Liverpool, 1943-Los Angeles 29-11-2001) believed …

The carpet of culture (2018)

In the first editions of Culturgal there was no carpet. Under the feet of the visitors was the cement of the palace and this perspective of horizontality and lack of posturing, that Galician perspective that cement is the solution to so many of the country’s problems, had unexpected consequences: it lowered the temperature of the atmosphere. Cement is like that: it removes water from the roads, but it is not very comfortable indoors.

Return to Revolver

É verdade: Apple Corps espreme o catálogo de The Beatles ata un nivel que, por veces, parece excesivo. Novas mesturas cada catro anos e estas edicións obrigadas a descubrir algo novidoso na discografía máis coñecida do planeta. Pero hai unha máxima que veu funcionando até o de agora: na música popular The Beatles son o canon e quedaron sos no seu nivel. A pregunta ben pode ser cantos grupos na historia soportarían este grao de atención? Agora toca Revolver que probablemente é o disco máis sorprendente do cuarteto.

No one will be saved

As the song goes on, the questions rise as another form of affirmation. After a health crisis will come another economic crisis and the merciful Manichaeism of capital will disappear from the horizon of explanations. And the relative mercy for people who die of having a virus will no longer count for people who die …

Pace of life

Today it’s been six years since Narf left (15th November 2016). A minute memory and a song. Narf was sinless. Musically. The rest is none of my business. Narf was free from sin because now and then he would go away, and we almost didn’t notice. And then he’d come back, and we’d almost have …

Whithout memory does not remain us paradise

In Muros no longer there is paradise. Now there is a supermarket. We were changing the rooms of party by tents and  have to understand that we change a model of leisure to touch  by one to spend. That is the starting point for the last work of Chévere, Eroski Paraíso. That, as everything in these days, raise …

Chévere reminisces

Chévere reminisces and we attend. He reminisces, and the parody went to them because there is no better way to explain the world than as a parody that only admits desperate humour. The humour is theirs, but the desperation, you know who it belongs to. Perhaps time does not exist. Maybe it is a manipulable …

So thirty years went by

Five years ago Chévere turned thirty. Now it is thirty-five and between exhibitions, disembarkations, books, films and the fact that the evil does not abate, they have not done anything to document the reality that is so often concealed. Let’s remember the memory.

Gore-Tex

Buonarroti and Shakespeare went around explaining this instant in which the relative contacts the absolute. They alluded to that moment in which the superior force lets some of its energy escape in favour of the one who is devoted. They both wandered the issue of power transfer, although neither had forced experiences with the economic …

7 | House by house

When he was a young boy, his father used to make fun of those whose job it was to go from house to house selling things. He didn’t think it was a respectable job. Avon calls. But we are in campaign and it is time to go door to door. The mayor decides the distribution …

Thinking too much

I think that it was Kundera the one who was apologetic about the gesture. I speak by little selective memory because I did not read him so much. I think he wrote of the gestures like a space frame that remains and that we, not being docile, would have to move by weeding. I think …

In the pocket of a blazer 

One day I put a book by Cortázar in the bottom pocket of a blazer. The jacket had nothing to do with blazes. It had crossed the Indian Ocean on a ship with a foreign name, its flaps like Vietnamese eyes. The book happily accommodated its angular character among a pen, two unpaid bills that …

Perralleirism continued (redux)

We continue for bingo. Second chance for perralleirism. The mood seems always the same, but the fault is ours for not changing. We are always far away. More alike than similar Always far awaySala NasaSeptember 21st, 2006 Mofa e Befa’s new production is a thesis play. The thesis is that we are more alike than …

Continued seedy (reload)

The Fiot of Carballo declared the year Mofa e Befa taking advantage of that they already happened thirty since it began the perralleirismo to give travelling lessons. It walks the Galician culture recapitulando and, as in that neighbourhoods, something nostalgic or perhaps melancholic of all what could be and was what went. Not to contribute …

Eating with the news

Eating with the news I put the food on the table as I turn on the TV and the world offers me its daily catalogue of cruelty, malice, frivolity and sport over a tuna empanada and some reheated chicken. Watch it all wholesale and I still have to go to the trouble of categorizing each …

Data of life, data of death

The statistics are clear with Niger: it is the last country in the world in wealth. Expressed like this is sarcasm. In reality, it is the first in poverty. According to international organizations, Niger is the poorest country on the planet. Poorer even that the most depressed neighbourhood of Harlem. But less violent. According to …

The Griñón marchioness

There are so many things to be scared of that what is scary is people are not scared. There are so many things to fear that perhaps we prefer to look the other way and look at the infidelity of a couple who lacked neither money nor attention or microphones, and perhaps not even a kind of intelligence related to class conveniences. The rich also suffer. What is not clear to me is why we should feel sorry for them. To put a filter on everything. As not to find out.

Breakfast with butter

The table is set. Has a little bit of everything, even butter. It is a continental breakfast. We could understand that this is a diplomatic territory, as an exception. We get treated like tourists and, for a tourist, there is no disturbing his ignorance. This preferential deal is almost inexorable. The first condition of the …

Nuclear button theory

Here’s the thing: while we debate the coming winter of discontents, while we focus attention on the basket of commodities trying to correct problems at destination when they should be corrected at origin, someone opens Wikipedia (which keeps asking for contributions to the common knowledge) and finds that there are nine countries in the world with nuclear armament. That there are nine briefcases in the world with nine buttons like nine doors to an end with apocalypse. The difference now is that one of those nine has just warned that for weapons to be good for something you have to be willing to use them.

Independent style republic

They decided to humanize the environment. To remove from sight so much industrial sheet metal that should already be replaced by noble materials. To entertain themselves or to make Godot less unhappy if he had to wait there. And to recycle. Yes, to recycle. Because the painting still fulfils its function and the space obviously …

RVB against the world universe

He always wanted to have a word with the world. But the world had a certain mania for avoiding him. So he would climb up on some wooden sticks, sometimes with a clown nose and sometimes not, and he would talk to the apostle as well as to the universe. I don’t remember that he …

The man who wrote here

At this point in the 21st century, I do not know if it is appropriate to ask ourselves what Roberto Vidal Bolaño’s work is like, how it evolved, what traces he left behind, how much of his decisions were artistic or practical, or how many of his life circumstances were decisive in making certain choices or others. Perhaps the appropriate thing to do in September 2022 is to ask ourselves the same question he would ask us: what did we do? What did we do in the last twenty years in general and what did we do in these twenty years with the work of Roberto Vidal Bolaño in particular. I am sure there is a verb that would summarize a large part of the answers and, even if true, it would still be escapist: to resist. Resist, we all resist and we are here, although this here would have nothing to do with RBV.

Van days

Roberto Vidal Bolaño is not a Chilean writer. September 2022 marks the 20th anniversary of his death, which, by all accounts, was early. He was 52 years old and had an extensive and varied career as a playwright, director, theatre and film actor, as an advanced film critic, an agitator of majorities and a definitive weight in the fact that the Galician theatre went from being a more or less eccentric dedication to a professional, demanding and enforceable exercise.

The writer who portrayed Galicia in the 20th century

Roberto Vidal Bolaño wanted Galicia to have its own theatre that handled its own arguments. He defined a way of writing for the stage and his decision was decisive for the launching of Galician professional theatre. There was a theatre to be invented and someone had to start doing it. It was Roberto Vidal Bolaño who began to articulate a self-sufficient Galician theatre, capable of explaining itself while explaining the country to which it belonged. A theatre that was interested in achieving majorities and connecting the languages that were to come with those that had survived the years of repression. RVB was a practical man and a multitasking playwright. He was precocious and serious, argumentative and ironic. He turned dedication into a craft, but it was not magic or union power: it was stubbornness and skill.

Galician theater is conservative with playwrights

For Roberto Vidal Bolaño, Saxo tenor was a change of aesthetic and argumentative direction. With this play, Vidal Bolaño entered into the suburbs, into suburban life and what is surely more important, into another way of seeing individuals, much more related to their circumstances and much less capable of taking charge of their destiny. Despite being the playwright who most regularly premieres in Galicia, almost always with his company, Bolaño considers that Galician theater restricts the work of authors, new and old, every year, and that in this decision there is a mixture of circumstances, from conservatism to ignorance. Saxo tenor was a turning point in Galician theater. In many ways, it was an inauguration that had no continuity. The text of that production, however, survived as a dramaturgical reference.

Smith & Company (naïve tale)

In the old days, those who owned horses were rich. And those who owned cows were rich too. Those who had stone houses, machines, meadows, or trees were rich too. But one day, the rich, tired of so much working with things, decided they didn’t want to dirty their hands with the handling of objects, …

Rebecca and the clouds

Rebecca painted the clouds quickly quickely because the summer was ending and the sun was still naked. She looked them passed, like distracted sheep grazing some grass, here or there. The smallest of all of them, red from the effort of following the flock, stopped to look at the girl, and she thought she was …

Chronic death

The situation in Niger is very bad. This is naïve and obvious. The bad thing about truisms is having to repeat them, and that the world hears them as such and at the same time denies the major: the situation in Africa is very bad, okay, we already know that. The last part of the …

Shadows, nothing more

Do you know the joke? There are many people who can be shot among those who demand the legalization of shooting. So I tell you, with this pose of telling a joke, that everyone wants to pass off as truth any matter that does not reach the first sentence of a joke. Half-truths, at best, …

Semper fidelis

It must be a Yankee Army custom to have a gala ball before marching off to war. I remembered it from that time at Fort Apache. He did it, he assumed, so that receiving the news of marching would have sufficient solemnity or, also, so that some officer could look worthy when pronouncing that the …

The collapse we will be 

A collapse is not an accident. It is a process with a bad end. A process that ends badly even though everyone knows along the way that it is going to end badly. In many ways, a collapse is the result of not wanting to understand the symptoms correctly. The electoral ones, the economic ones, …

Thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths…

And where do you live: in reality or in fiction? Wherever you are, the same thing happens: an almost permanent manipulation of the discourse so that the universal condition of the spectator that is to be a citizen can feel calm and surprised. Even surprised at their own tranquillity.

6 | Neither virtual nor the other

– Facebook, what is it?– A website for gossipers.– And why don’t you ask the mayor?– Because he will answer the same as you. But you’re the one in charge of culture, you should know.– Of course, I know. We’re working on it. This week is going to be a spectacular Facebook.– Better than Rajoy’s?– …

Herd immunity

There are many days when we are a candour tied to a relic of progress. And we do not distinguish whether the rope we wear around our necks is condemnation or liberation. When young we listened to the promises of three-room apartments, but instead of receiving the keys in hand, we were given a spatula …

“Theater is life concentrated”

Peter Brook (1925-2022) visited Santiago de Compostela in 1998 as the main character of the first edition of the Festival Millenium. Two of his plays were part of the programming, Je suis a phénomène and Oh les beaux jours. Brook explained over and over what he considered theatre and the festival took place in a closed cinema Capitol that, for the director, seemed to have the advantage of being very close to ruin. The past week (2nd of July, 2022) Brook died and from 1998 an interview came back along with two critiques and a conclusion. The interview and the critiques of his two shows in Santiago are still here. The conclusion is that, despite his prestige, recognition, intelligence and even Brook’s success, the theatre didn’t pay him any attention.

Early morning arrived

He put up a fight all night and did not give it up. Since he had come in, finding himself so uncomfortable. Pacing up and down the field despite playing away from home. He walked past the groups looking for faces, trying to find a look that would return some kindness. It was a delicate, …

Game of pastiches

I didn’t waste too much time reading George R.R. Martin, not even to check the idea that pastiche is the genre par excellence of contemporaneity. Of this particular contemporaneity.

Unsolved labour tension

All the labour tension that is so clearly perceived in the photography does not come from a historical conflict with the patronal, from breaking the rule of labour risks or from the fact that this telephone, son of a decade of fixed elements, sounds uninterruptedly like a hammer that strikes from the past. The labour …

Stories of a man who told stories

Xabier P. Docampo disappeared last week. Memory brings back to us his attitude as an all-stories storyteller as well as that humor he practiced to bring down the saints and bring up the people. (Four years ago of the text and a few more of the stories, but continue, they remain the same).

Gray matter

The box was made of cardboard and, when opened, the flaps made a movement to make way for a ceramic container of a very, very soft gray. Almost white. On the card were printed all the symbols of recycling, eco-sustainability, the second life of things. For those who could remember, the box had some kinship …

Unnormalized nerves

The text is dated January 20, 2009. Now it is archaeology, but this past week there was some talk about this without going to the heart of the matter. The pyramids are best explained from the outside.

On the walls

You know how it goes. Summer in Ourense. The only wave that survives is the heat wave. You have the timetables of a lifetime. Those of a civil servant city where you are not a civil servant. You have the schedules of a world that doesn’t get hot at noon. You have to go to …

In the middle of the middle

What is transgressive for a theatergoer is not watching the stage. Nor is it to watch the reaction of the rest of the audience. What is revolutionary is to look at the space between the stage and the seats. A no man’s land where all things happen.

Difficult love triangle

That line over there is a horizon. Anyone thinks of horizons as a decisive line, but like all human invention it is irregular and eaten by doubts. But it is a horizon and there is room for things we want and things we don’t want. For some, this horizon is a source of pride because …

May de force forsake us

When the Constitution arrived, Star Wars was already here. The galactic western with confusing paternities arrived in Spain before the great text. When Luke still did not know who his father was, I was leaning out of the Xesteira cinema’s gallery in Ourense. It was 1977 and now it is frowned upon saying that the …

Bouquet

It had fallen right there. Burst. As if lightning had struck and split it. But without breaking it. It had fallen vertically, without drama, without signs, without slow motion. It died more instantly than a decaf envelope. He was beside her and it took him four or five seconds to recognize the seriousness of the …

Yellow aristocracy

Sport is moving from spectacle to storytelling. Sport has that low-key epic that is dramatic without any drama and warlike without any war. You can do with it whatever you want except maybe ignore it because it’s almost impossible to live and not have sport looming everywhere. Television, moreover, is changing from being the preferred …

5 | The anonymous are unknown

He was picked up next to the pharmacy. He entered through the back door of an Audi. In the front seat were the mayor, driving, and the chief of the Guardia Civil post. The mayor looked at him in the rearview mirror. – Don’t look at me like that, man. If we call the priest …

The curved beam

One of the great armament advantages of the Ming emperor over the earthlings of Flash Gordon’s time was the curved beam. In spite of being a conventional weapon, it had the property of firing on enemies protected in the corners. There was no point in hiding because the beam came out of the weapon, advanced in an irregular line until it reached a spot, turned and located whoever unwarily relied on conventional physics. The sentry boxes had ceased to be a shelter. It cannot be said that the USA, Russia, Israel or the British Prime Minister is not testing weapons like the curved beam. But it exists.

Schrödinger’s raincoat

It could be the time when Inspector Gadget ruled the cartoons with that stupidity saved by a smart niece. Or the time when trucks didn’t have electric brakes or hardly passed the MOT because there wasn’t one. The photo is as real as a photo can be. Neither CIA montages of Castro nor Stalin’s editing …

May 13, 2022. Naked

I feel naked. Distrustful. But not both for the same reasons. I feel naked because I am no longer president of Galicia, Galicia, Galicia. And I know I have to be, but it is not that I enjoy it either. I have been president, president, president for so many years that now it is like …

Pop does not say goodbye

For Siniestro Total those words that wanted to mark the end of The Beatles are not valid. “And in the end, the love you received is equal to the love you gave”. The chords didn’t go that way, but in a more literal translation* it would have served for that version of the Liverpool band …

The midday sun rises early

You get up early and the sun is already at noon. The most direct surroundings of the hotel are almost European: watered lawn, terrace, parasol, flowers. It is not a luxury either, but here the perspective plays, and the circumstance is always a bitch. There is a wall, of course. There is always a wall …

Ourense has more terraces than Liverpool

In Ourense, many lines are crossed. In a morning that anticipates the summer, the Galician anthem on the speakers of the working class can come across the morning vermouth terraces with many big heads and no giant. The bouquets of maternal flowers come across the crosses of the maios and their copla soniquete. The Beatles do, too. Not The Beatles. The memory without almost any soundtrack of the most important musical group in history.

April 29, 2022. Farewell

GaliciaJacobean YearManuel: I remember many things at this time. Of when I met you at JMRB’s house, of when you proposed me to come, of the tensions of the intrigues and the transfers. One day they passed by asking who to notify in case of termination and the real possibility of it happening left us …

The chronicle of the critique

Midseason makes me melancholic. Unlike the rest of the Galicians, so determined to blame everything on the humidity. The undefined weather makes me melancholic as a spectator and instead of being objective, as everyone asks with their immediate interests, I only manage to be coherent. It was at the end of one of those musical …

April 20, 2022. Impossible

It is not that everybody does not understand, it is that it is not convenient for them to understand so they give convenient explanations. I have to explain it among the immediate circle and some fewer close ones because they play the fool as if it were an emotional matter, but although sometimes I am …

Who cares about that?

Everyone has an opinion about the theater even if only a tenth of those who have an opinion go see the plays. It is easier to give an opinion than to go to the theater and that is why there are more people giving their opinions on Twitter than going to the theaters. The two activities are not incompatible, but the eyes suffer infinitely less when going to the theater.

April 15, 2022. Diary. Serious, serious, serious

Well, it’s already solved. I’m going to explain it because it’s funny this much business with succession, so much breaking and putting the pieces back together again. But not quite. There was only one way for this to work and it was clear from the beginning. Another thing is that everybody has to assert themselves. …

April, 12, 2022. Diary. Madrí, Madrí, Madrí

In Madrí everything is bigger. It is not a sensation. Everything is bigger. People are also taller. I don’t know if I will have to put heights on my shoes because after meeting Felipe VI and Pedro Sánchez I look short and this needs to be studied. But you have to measure because someone chose …

Buttface

Between subliminal images, half-truths and their corresponding half-lies, political correctness, education, between what can be said and what should not be uttered, overwhelming sincerity and diplomacy, between hyperbole and metaphors it is becoming more difficult every day to be frank.  The appearance of Twitter was not necessary to know that there are double standards or …

Mistaking curves for joys

It may be the caprice of property or the weakness of the state before the individual. It may be the winding character that comes to the map from the collective identity. There is something twisted in the immediacy of the horizon in which the Academy can find a reaffirmation of nineteenth-century loveliness. Bucolism’s victory against …

April 1, 2022. Diary

The time has come. It had to come and it came. Now I have to change my mind and start thinking differently. Because things are not working well. Now that they think the plight is over is when I am in the plight. They don’t notice my authority. Problem A) I could prioritize the confrontation …

Noise and nuts

There will be a butterfly effect between the appearance of Motomami and the moment Will Smith turns into the character he plays in The Suicide Squad, even less violent. It may be a primal relationship, but it sure won’t be simple. We all want to believe it is, but the world doesn’t change: as soon as we …

4 | If the phone rings at midnight

Go home. Turn on the TV. They abuse the Lakers mercilessly. As he misses Trecet, he goes over his to-do list. He has to make the holiday plan. Doing a party show is like being a coach: everyone knows how to do it, everyone has something to say, everyone finds the flaws. Look at the …

Two colonizations

Niger is, in many ways, in the heart of Africa. Of the Africa that, for some reason, we call black. The one who suffered two colonizations very distant in time and did not manage to overcome any of them. The first of Niger’s colonizations was Muslim. Economically adaptable to the occupied territories, it altered the …

Arriving at night

Arriving at night to any unknown place is disorienting. Getting into a car to travel a few miles of relatively well-lit wide avenues only adds to the traveler’s anxiety to get situated. There are long straightaways and traffic circles, as if on a string of lines. The light is ghostly and the distance is intermittent. …

What do you want, you bastard

The fact that the sun had been presiding over the morning horizon for two hours was not because of his joy. He jumped out of bed, put on his shorts and ran into the kitchen. Mom, I’ll get the bread. He looked at the clock and quickened his pace. Entered the bakery and looked for …

But laugh

For a man to speak for women as if he knows what to say means he is either foolish or presumptuous. Maybe both things come together. That’s why I’m only going to talk about the picture. The photo of women protected by the metallic covering of Caixa Ourense circulated on the digital world without the …

Towards Oira

It would be much easier towards Oira. To walk along the river bank, among the ghosts of old abandoned buildings and the civilized steps of almost furtive fishermen. It would be lighter to walk looking at the backwaters like the calm that comes after a decision already made. No matter how much river is left, …