bees. just bees.

[contiued]

The following morning, I’m piecing together the tatters of a sandblasted bus timetable and blearily headed a few miles down to Finisterre – another Land’s End; like the Cornish and Breton versions, more an idea than a place, struggling to live up to the responsibility of being the last place on earth. The village is likeably scruffy, built on the sheltered side of the steep headland around a stone harbour. Today, the fishing boats (rust and registration number) and smart visiting sailboats (Isabella 2, Little Princess) barely bob in a calm that seems unearthly, given the 3,000 miles swilling beyond the promontory. I want to take a chalked-up mast and skim red buoys across the baizey harbour waters into lobster pot pockets.
On the road up to the lighthouse which marks mainland Europe’s last whimper are a handful of pilgrims unsated by Santiago’s lichen and gilt and walking on until there is no more land to walk on. The Camino straggles semi-officially here, following a route that predates the Christianised version with a simpler narrative – a walk to the end of the world. The tradition is to collect a seashell, and then, without bitterness, to burn the boots or clothes which have barely survived the weeks on the road. It’s unexpectedly moving to come across these twisted remains on the rocks facing westward to nothing but water and weather. This is a place for contemplation, with a wistfulness that comes of knowing what’s behind, and what little there is left in front.

Up on the headland, with wrens and linnets darting and gorse and blackthorns clinging to rocks, the relative bustle of the cluster of buildings around the lighthouse is lost high above the Atlantic, silent on a sunny day but for the putter of a few dinghies as fishermen drag crabs from between the green knuckle headlands. Emptied of anything but stillness and hunger, I wander down to the harbour, and, in one of the smaller bars, work my way through some spectacular razorshell clams and one Estrella Galicia after another. It starts to rain, and doesn’t look like stopping. This time the bus takes it slowly, nudging round the hairpins and the pinetopped cliffs back to the campsite. With tent flapping wildly, peering out into a mist with foghorns lowing from three directions, I’m starting to understand this place.

skinks for grykes

[last year, I went here:]

When the names of Spanish coasts were handed out, Galicia’s northwestern corner drew the shortest straw. As other costas flaunted badges proclaiming their rugged, golden, light, sunny, white or tropical qualities, the Costa del Muerte slunk home to sulk in the Atlantic mist. This sodden, often chilly, wild and slightly unearthly place will always struggle when brochures are flicked through and holiday money gambled. The weather here is unreliable, the buses infrequent, the tourist menus come chalked in two languages – Gallego and Castillian – and it largely shuns promenades, car parks and pineapple chunk pizza. And it’s unabashedly, spectacularly, eerily beautiful.

In part, it’s the familiarity, the similarity to those other westward peninsulas that goad the ocean to angry storms. Like Dingle or Penwith, the bays, coves, and boulder-strewn hills are often bathed in a strange watery light that floats, doesn’t flatten like the hammering sun further south. Everything looks not quite to scale – a too closely shot model, soon to be swept away by monstrous match flames or a bucket-sized tsunami. And like Brittany, it has a Celtic apartness, more ancient than the surrounding lands.

The Coast of Death lies an hour from A Coruña, Galicia’s biggest city, a Cadiz in reverse stuck out into mists of the Bay of Biscay. A Coruña is a modern city, but the coast road winds west through the centuries – a succession of buildings, from tumbledown cottages constructed from an impossibly minimal number of stones to houses seemingly transported from the uPVC section of a Wickes catalogue. Here, churches jut mossily from the hills and promontories of one of Spain’s most resolutely Catholic regions, stripped of the dazzle and gilt of the baroque version of Christianity further south, and served with an austere side order of fatalism and a crust of salt. The most overtly religious buildings of all, perched on mushroom stilts, and protected by as many crosses as can be carved into gables without toppling, are not chapels to stylite saints preaching the benefits of aerial worship, but granaries (horreos) to keep grain hard-won from this poor soil out of reach of mice.

The landscape is very familiar: quartz and heather mingle on rocky grassland for which, after a moment’s geographical nervousness, ‘moors’ seems appropriate. Elsewhere are sandier heaths, and woodland, sodden green or bluish under the advance of invasive eucalyptus. And the coast, which glitters when the sun is not too shy to shine.

I’m staying at Estorde, a short, sheltered beach, where Atlantic waves are tamed in summer by the bay; though even here the undertow is strong enough to pull old or young off their feet into indignity. A few sailboats are moored overnight in the bay overnight, there’s a campsite, a pricey hostal and an expectation that the season will last no longer than the slumbering ocean allows. This place is not yet built for tourists – public transport is sparse and opening hours still tailored to a rural economy.

On the sand, two old men exchange tales about long-lost women before dipping cautious toes into the chill August sea. There’s little but rockpools, sand and lapping water: nothing to do for the kids here but scare each other with tales of barely hidden sea monsters as parents sprawl like ageing seals, to sit and dig, construct cities from sand with just enough river mud to bind beautifullly, and, when the mist and cloud finally clears, to race to the water leaving footprints that glisten and fade.

This part of the coast seems to specialise in the kind of precipitious drop from path to doom which sets the toes tingling. Of course, the coast was named from the opposite perspective – the way the cliffs produce such a sudden, vertiginous edge to the Atlantic, with rocks, hardship and voyages’ all-too-sudden end. Scrambling over the next headland and settling for a while, I nod off, thinking of home in the gorse and the sandy turf and before long, the lighthouse beams are sweeping the last of the sun away.

Next day, I wander through Corcubión and Cee, two towns in one around one of the rias characteristic of this part of the coast, and resorts of a kind solely by virtue of land meeting sea. Corcubión is in the early stages of touristification, with the first crop of overreaching ventures already withered and ready to be swept aside by boutique everything. The town, a step back from the harbour-front is magnificently crumbling and seedy, with buildings bound by hope more than mortar, sturdy old women obligingly shaking linen from windows and dogs threatening from balconies. Cee’s elusive charm is of a strange, municipal flavour. However, all buses lead to here, and I seem carlessly destined to keep coming back until the health centre, all new shopping centre and selection of drab bars are overfamiliar. Headed to the steeper land across the bay, the taxi driver tells me, ‘No, not many English; mostly Germans, and more at Finisterre. But not so many of anyone’. Some up and down later, we’re in Ézaro, a village which, at first glance, could win the title of Sleepiest Beach Town in Europe, if it could only rouse itself to complete the short form necessary. Along with neighbouring O Pindo, it sits under Monte Pindo, threatened by boulders seemingly tumbled down on a giant’s whim. There’s a bleak beauty to the landscape here, with fells stepping down to the sea, dry stone walls dividing salty fields of questionable value, and when the sun ducks under the mountain, it could be upland England, or the Burren. The village offers nothing to do but scramble up the hill for some astonishing views, then sit in the one bar open outside of mealtimes and wait for the weather to change, and my taxi driver to turn up, apologetically thirty seconds late…

busy

busy, like. taking no photos. writing no guff. apart from some really quite bad fiction.

under cover of fog and forget

[More old...]

A man and dog hug the shade by a whitewashed wall. The dog, a little unsteady in the heat, moves slowly through the weeds and parched wildflowers of the gravely field edge. When the bus from the city announces its arrival with swirling dust devils and a squash of tyres on tarmac, the man whistles, and walks forward with hands in pockets.
In the late May sun, Chipiona bus station bakes on one of those expanses of scrub dotted between unlovely half-built developments that are modern Andalusia’s response to the tumbledown Roman aqueduct, the stork-topped mudejar tower and the whitewashed brick wreckage of a thousand years’ weathered housing stock. Under the concrete canopy, teenagers thump down fold-out stairs first, eyeing each other in white denim, strappy tops, baggy shorts and baseball caps. As the last pensioner stiffly descends, man and dog look on, before he turns away, shaking his head, still whistling. The dog follows, pattering always in whatever shade can be found, headed somewhere lazier.

We walk past a T-junction, where local scooter girls wait, glancing at the incoming city talent before puttering towards the sea, ask directions to the beach, and are pointed to a bleached unfinished road between low-rise buildings. It’s not so easy. Three beaches fold around this town – the squint against the wind and you’d miss it Las Canteras, the short, scruffy-dog-loveable Cruz del Mar, mostly shored up behind ancient and murky fish pens, and the longer La Regla, backed with cheap hotels painted brightly, optimistically, against the Atlantic wind. The lighthouse, Spain’s tallest, gives a sense of the dangers of this coast of waves, wind and currents, though today the ocean seems too sunbeaten to work at the rocks. Down where the tired rollers trundle to a halt, a boy, no more than ten, tanned and sure-footed, with curling toes gripping the slimy surface, is fishing from the breakwater. He stares at the sea, accusingly, as if his were the only baited hook on the whole Atlantic coast. He’s caught nothing all day. Turn the corner, beyond the lighthouse, and the beach curves away, at the point where the town loses conviction, to the church of Nuestra Senora de la Regla. There, a black madonna statue blesses those who wrestle trawlers and lilos alike. More of the latter, these days.

Along the seafront, in front of the overspill of the cafes and bars, a girl in a communion dress walks on the very edge of the pavement, itching to get on the sand; others are plain itching, as the coarse sand peppers oiled skin in the gusty wind. Over the low seawall, a grandad in a sailor hat fusses round children who work diligently on sandcastle extensions, and a brother-on-brother penalty shootout goes into sudden death. Urgency has put its feet up and is sipping a spritzer in the shade.

It’s an easy kind of pleasure to sit, feet in sand, outside a bar seemingly airfixed together from plastic weatherboarding, watching the comings and goings, and listening to weekending Sevillanos dispute the merits of the city’s two football clubs in characteristically belligerent tones. This corner of Cádiz province lies at the end of a blessedly air-conditioned bus route from the swelter of summer in the Andaluz capital, and a jostle of down-for-the-day teenagers, squabbling families and shuffling retirees bears out the attraction of this ventilated coast for those in the airless interior. They come to stretch out, to sprawl on the beach in bikinis and heels, or muffintopped swimshorts, and to eat and drink. Whilst the former tuna-fishing villages skewered on the silver coastline to Tarifa have a surfy, international flavour, this end of the Costa de la Luz remains marinated in sherry. Sanlucar, just ten kilometres away, is the home of manzanilla, the lightest grade of the sherry bodegas’ product, with a salty tang and a fresh, slightly oily taste well suited to the spit-and-seaweed ambience. Chalked up on a hundred blackboards, food is simple, and tailored to the local obsession with the brisk transfer of catch to bubbling oil – fried anchovies, hake and cuttlefish, shrimp fritters, battered cod, battered prawns, battered batter.

IIn the backstreets of the old town, the church square hides a Cruz de Mayo, one of the lower-key Andalusian mergings of God and the bottle. The cross itself is elegantly dressed with vines, and flowers, in a dinghy washed up on a beach of petals. The action is at the temporary bar, where a flamenco-dressed matron spins with enthusiasm to piped sevillanas, her heavy steps watched by a small crowd, syncopated clapping echoing around the plaza. Nearby, lovers recline under the shade of a palm, in front of the wedding cake church, decked with bougainvillaea. It’s a moment of distilled Andalusia, a drop or two of oily beauty. But even this seems too earnest for Chipiona. It’s a bucket and spade kind of place, unfussy, unstuffy and, with only a narrowing of eyes, a babelfish in the ear, and a broken thermometer, it could be anywhere on the more windswept coasts of England, complete with the steamy tang of fried fish, the rattle of one-armed bandits and the spillage of plastic cup punters onto promenades.

some times thers mor in the empty paper nor

Busy. But have something on the go for this space.

Meanwhile, a photo of the Atlantic.

growls at strangers

The Sevilla Foto festival is all over most of the Alameda and a good bite of the rest of the city. I’m particularly enjoying the Foto Rutas collective exhibition. There’s something oddly pleasing in seeing familiar shop windows embellished with some excellent photos.

six kinds of thankless

[more prefabbed travel guff no one wants. See how I can write in a style I really don't like]

Pick an Andalusian town, any Andalusian town. Given luck, you’ll find a crumbling Moorish castle, a crop of wonderful churches, some palaces, patios, the last trappings of mediaeval Christianity and more bars than can possibly be sustained by anything other than the inhabitants’ impressive commitment to the good things in life.

Luckier still and it will be Carmona casually ticking off the checklist and asking if you’d like fries. A romantically derelict Alcazar, a flush of fine churches, a shady main square, bars, restaurants and a handful of hotels are all here, but what makes Carmona special is the box-set succession from Neolithic remains, through Carthaginian, Roman, Moorish, and Renaissance styles, right through to the mouldering art nouveau of the Cerezo Theatre.

Arriving at siesta time, there’s little to do but wander the streets and wait for the town to open like a jetlagged flower; it’s the kind of sleeping beauty Andalusia does so well, away from the crowded coasts and cities – a music box tinkle to Seville’s brassy blare. Even by local standards (nearby Écija is another outcrop of perfection on the dusty plain), this small town is crammed with unregarded masterpieces alongside the picturesque decay of a thousand years of housing stock. As everywhere in the province, ancient churches are scarred with the blocked doorways and windows of social and ecclesiastical change – patches on patches, mortar on rubble. There’s quiet splendour in the delicate plasterwork on the library, the palatial houses in the centre of town, the domes and courtyards, and the shapes and textures of innumerable balconies and doors.

A fair walk outside the town walls through the colossal Puerta de Sevilla is the Necropolis, where, in the late 19th century, hundreds of burials of the more well-to-do citizens of Roman Carmo were uncovered. It’s a little spooky descending into a mausoleum in the silence of off-season solitude, starting at the scuttle of a lizard and checking nervously over your shoulder. While none of the tombs offer any Tutankhamun moments, this is an atmospheric place, and a surprising glimpse of just what a substantial town this was in the days when Baetica was one of the richest provinces in the Empire. Further Roman survivals are the amphitheatre across the road and, in the old town, the restored Puerta de Cordoba where the city walls spill on to the broad plain, now, as when first built, awash with grain.

Skipping forward a few hundred years, the Alcazar is as uncompromising a pile as you’ll find, though part-transformed into an elegant parador (with prices to match), looking out across the plain with well-heeled grace. This kind of reinterpretation is nothing new, as the town’s Mudéjar belltowers show – here, as elsewhere, the Reconquest subsumed and transformed, working on anything but a blank slate. San Pedro’s Giralda-Lite form and the convents of Santa Maria de Gracia and the Convento de las Descalzas (a beauty and the beast pairing) are highlights, but there are too many churches in the town for anything other than bewilderment at past social priorities. Also worth looking out for is the Iglesia del Salvador, its tower seemingly snapped off like a cone under the weight of the ice cream dome. It was never finished.

On the secular side, the old town’s main plaza is surrounded by elegant buildings, with the disintegrating Moorish Revival façade of Bar Goya the standout – and the food’s not bad either. Most of the bars serve up a blackboard of Andaluz favourites; so far from the ports, land wins out over sea, and ham, grilled pork and pulses are to the fore. This time of day it’s strictly for tourists. The locals are elsewhere: perhaps in Bodega Jose Mari (opposite the market square) where fragments of Roman columns support the doorway and a rough chalk scrawl proudly proclaims the first of the year’s mosto. Sadly, before I have time to sample more than a glass or two of what’s on offer, it’s time for the bus back to the city. Though, Seville being Seville, that’s not such a hardship.

the simple node and link variety

[An old review. No reason for putting it here beyond liking one or two of the sentences, and the continuation of the Rocio thing not being quite ready]

George Saunders – Pastoralia
So here we have it. Another tape-guided solo electric vehicle tour around LifeWorld®, the theme park that’s like…you know…REAL. And what a jerking, whining, battery-powered ride it is. Pastoralia is the second collection of short stories from George Saunders, America’s leading purveyor of odd-shaped fictional tools for picking the holes in the American dream.

These are the stories of people who never got their promised 15 minutes: the ugly, the balding, and toothless, the too tall, the too fat, the too mothered, the unwanted. Characters who were trampled under in the foundations of the human pyramid, still desperately thumbing self-help books and combing thinning hair in patented rejuvenating mirrors, still holding out some tuxedo hope in a threadbare suit. Characters who never got enough, or even never asked. The leftovers after the rest of us have made our killings.

It’s a deeply compassionate book, full of sadness, a sense of injustice and a sharp eye for the half-truths that fuel the elbow-dash for cash or status. Saunders’ jaundiced view is conveyed with a voice that is wonderfully attuned to the language and easygoing misbehaviour of all-incorporating corporate life. Casual customer evaluation reports control the lives of underlings in seedy tourist attractions. A self-made self-help business guru preaches his mantra: ‘Now is the Time for You to Win’. Everything is Capitalised (in both senses). Characters squat in their Separate Areas, unable to communicate – it’s against Regulations.

Like Catch 22, what starts out somehow charming, with oddball characters in elliptic orbits around a moving off-centre, slowly escalates into something bitter, incisive, even horrific, although still darkly, outrageously, painfully funny. And funny it is. This is a snigger on the bus book, a stuff hand in mouth in a meeting book, and a book that can’t be easily explained:

BYSTANDER: So what’s so funny?

YOU: Well; there’s this kid who’s completely unloved at home, so much so that his mum and stepdad have got a special name for him which they pretend is a term of endearment, but which isn’t, and who responds by living a fantasy life to such an extent that he ends up getting run over by a car and killed, unable to embrace any sense of self-worth despite the redemptive efforts of the last person he talks with.

All six stories scuttle about in the shadows of that same 51st State that CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, his first collection, mapped so effectively;and they need to be read, by everyone who ever believed any of the inch-thick PR plastered over the writing on the wall:

Let me tell you something. Something about this country. Anybody can do anything. But first they gotta try. And you guys ain’t…You kids make squat. And therefore you live in a dangerous craphole. And what happens in a dangerous craphole? Bad tragic shit. It’s the freaking American way – you start out in a dangerous craphole and work hard so you can someday move up to a somewhat less dangerous craphole. And finally maybe you get a mansion. But at this rate you ain’t even gonna make it to the somewhat less dangerous craphole.

(Sea Oak)

It is the freaking American way. And when trickle-down has trickled away, and evaluations have denied us value, apple pie be praised we can still slouch over to literary satire’s top table, where George Saunders is picking over the National Carcass and finding the wishbone already broken.

the beautiful panic was on

Not being able to sing beyond a weak sub-Ray Davies whine wobbingly icing a layered harmony, I have an elastic fascination for those who can. Like the numbers on the bathroom scales, the magnitude of those morning shakes and the proportion of nights whose memory is squirreled away into deep storage by the kindly internal archivist who looks after my self-regard, it’s growing with age. I’ve been a while getting here through those areas of a record collection tied more to a minimally cool cover image and the right array of studio technology, but will now tolerate (gripe about, roll my eyes at, mentally strip of Nashville or rototoms) the most unsinkable studio turds if a singer I love was called in somewhere along the way to hold their nose and spray the vocal air freshener.

This obsession is specifically directed at American singers, and more particularly at those from southern states who wrap themselves in the dusty vinylwear of old country, blues and soul records. There’s something about the way the language can be wrangled into rhyme and melody in a Deep South accent that makes for repeated listening to that same 20 seconds where the voice does that, whatever that might be.

So, in a bid to pogostick away from the drab insistence of other people’s texts, this is the first in a series of somethings about some moments from some voices I sometimes love. Here seems as good a point as any to note that this is no way intended as anything like the blinding scholarship of blogs such as this one, and this (is it only soul collectors who need to gather whatever wool still clings to the barbed wire of collective memory when the wind no longer blows wherever Johnny Dynamites and Denise Keebles graze?). It’s just an excuse to wander through a tiny bit of what makes me need some of my records.

So.

Exhibit one, crying in the night, is James Carr: Memphis-born and a manic depressive, condemned to a typically downhill life by sharp business practices and a malfunctioning welfare system, but possessed of? (no, by) a voice that could break artichoke hearts on an upscale pizza. Which is as well, because the material is often thin of crust and a little heavy on the cheese. Take You Got my Mind Messed Up (clearly modelled on That’s How Strong My Love Is, a ballad best, if not best-known, in the Otis Redding version). It’s a two-line chorus, some sketchy verses and a few great horn hooks, held together by the velcro scratchiness of that extraordinary voice, and a wonderful record. For now though, it’s not my favoured James Carr fix.

Pathos is, of course, as soul as soul can be; which is perhaps why current favourite These Ain’t Raindrops does what it does. It’s not a great song, suffers from some back-of-a-Muscle-Shoals-bus lyrics and the arrangement is not much more than likably functional, but I love it for the yelping whipped-dog pleading, pleading. It’s fairly easy to slip into a frame of mind where

If you tell me you love me, everything will be ok

can taste like distilled experience. And the delivery is archetypal southern soul – highly stylised, but wringing everything out of an emotional magic sponge of a song, without the vinegary melismatic horrors we’re daily conditioned to think of as singing.

Here it is:

like link wray gone uke

“The wigs of lawyers could hardly acquire their modern significance until other people stopped wearing wigs”
Eric Hobsbawm. The Invention of Tradition.

I’m not sure what to make of the Rocio pilgrimage (link with a great old photo). It’s a revealingly Andaluz spectacle, with casual stapling of scraps of what people really want to do (travel and camp with friends, drink, get dressed up) to a religious manilla folder of devotion and faith-based healthcare.
More on this when I’m able, but for now it brings one of those clifftop gulps to think how we got to here, where an ox in the city streets is a miracle and a news helicopter is unregarded background.