Today I am being spammed by a word list.
“Cycatki
Cycletrader
Cyclobenzapr
Cyclone tracy
Cydney bernard
Cylaris
Cymbalta side effects
Cyndis list
Cyoc
Cystocele
Cystoscopy
Cytheria
Cytomel
Cyveillance
Cz firearms
Cz rifles
Czech embassy kabul”
Exactly what this is supposed to entice me to I’m not sure.
Most of you probably know, and I may even have mentioned here, that recently I’ve embarked on a mission to become a better cook. Every week I cook a traditional Spanish meal for a group of friends. After a month of doing it I tried to beg off this week, for a break because I had a lot of other stuff going on, but they wouldn’t let me. Instead we moved it to the weekend (normally it’s a weeknight) which was nice, it was a lot more relaxed.
There were seven of us in all, I’d prepared a few dishes beforehand – a Galician empanada (kind of a giant square pasty, stuffed with a cooked mixture of tuna and vegetables, in this case – pepper, onion, tomato) and boquerones en vinagre (boquerones are a small fish, very like a sardine, in this dish they are eaten raw, marinated in salt and vinegar and then later stored in olive oil with garlic and pepper), and then the main dish was Cocido Madrileño, which is a stew made with great hunks of meat, sausage, animal bones, fat, potato, carrot and chickpeas. The stock is used to make a soup which is served before the main course. Frankly, it was probably a bit of a big hurdle to jump, it’s an incredibly beloved dish, and everyone has a different way of making it… I had three conflicting recipes to deal with, and we even phoned someone’s grandmother for advice at one point. It is not a particularly complicated dish, but still.
It came out alright, though not perfect, the meat was too tough and the soup was, well, completely the wrong colour (think poo).
For desert I made an apple crumble, half of which was adulterated with raisins and cinnamon (the more popular half, naturally), and then we also had Μαστίχα, brought along by my Greek friend Petros. Μαστίχα is a Greek desert made from the resin of a shrub which grows on the island of Chiros. To eat it you submerge spoonfuls in cold water and then suck it, good stuff.
For posterity I’ve been planning since the beginning to record all my recipes here, and they’re now littered around various places, electronically and on paper, and in various different languages, but I’m going to try and start doing it properly now, so here then are recipes for:
Empenada Gallega (coming soon)
Boquerones en Vinagre
Cocido Madrileño (coming soon)
Apple Crumble
Well that was fuerte.
There have been less emotional days, it must be said.
Less tearful days too.
The classes went one by one to watch the video I put together and emerged, one by one and streaming with tears.
‘It’s too much,’ said one of the teacher, ‘si, lo sé,’ I replied (yes, I know) ‘No, no,’ she said, I don’t mean that, I think it’s the right length and everything…’ But she was right, it was too much, how could it not have been?
The pupils and staff who spoke during the service were beautiful and fearless.
The songs were old and deeply religious. We should have played some Queen, or Guns N’ Roses, his favourite groups.
The priest spoke a lot about paz y alegria (peace and happiness) and a lot of stuff I didn’t agree with much.
The whole act was full of secret symbols and phrases that everyone by me knew the proper responses to… but anyway…
So we remember Diego and, as the priest said, do indeed still see him in the eyes of our hearts.
I get lots of spam on this blog from all the usual suspects, but last week I got my first for:
“Above ground Swimming Pool Installers…”
Almost made me click on through, but only almost. Better luck next time spammers.
I started writing this blog mainly for myself, to record what was going on and to have something to look back on. It was nice that other people could read it too, and find out what was going on. Recently, as previously noted, I just haven’t, as we say in Spanish, had the ganas to write about the stuff that happens, for a number of reasons, and at the same time, for no particular reason. Anyway, thinking about things, if for no other reason, it’s a shame to lose my own record of time passing increasingly rapidly, so I promise to try harder, ok. What I won’t do is start with a list of things we’ve missed.
Today was a weird day, because there was a teacher’s strike. This works a little weirdly, and I can’t remember if I’ve talked about it before, so I’ll run down it again:
Teachers choose whether to strike or not, but it is up to them whether they inform anybody either way, and most don’t. The school informs the parents that there will be a strike and individual teachers may choose to inform their pupils (and parents) whether or not they themselves will be striking. Some parents choose to keep their children at home, but most don’t, and the school has a responsibility to provide a minimum of service. So I fully expected to be teaching all day, only to arrive to find the school very stricken for teachers and therefore the majority of pupils playing in the playground, because that was the only way to supervise them with the people available. In the afternoon I bunked off an art lesson (with not much inclination to supervise free drawing) and did paper work instead and then I went and observed a chess lesson, these probably deserve a post of their own.
Anyway, tomorrow is going to be another weird day. It will be one month after the death of Diego, one of the pupils at the school, and the school is remembering him with a Catholic Mass on the playground at the end of the day. In addition I was asked to make a video (which is one of the things I’ve been busy with recently) which will be showing in one of the classrooms throughout the day, with children coming to watch in groups. I think the video’s pretty heartbreaking personally, and once I consider it finished (which it nearly is, one or two interlacing problems to sort out tonight) I won’t watch it again. These are the video jobs one doesn’t like getting asked to do.
It will be my first Mass (unless memory fails) and I’m somewhat intrigued.
On another note, it’s interesting that no sooner had I banged out my last post about last.fm than they announce that they’re going to block access to people outside all but a few countries. Which, quite frankly, is rubbish. I’ve been thinking for a long time that the internet on which we now depend for quite a lot, in it’s current add-supported, free to users model, is a fairly shaky foundation on which to depend, and you realise, that one day it’s all going to come crashing down, don’t you? – facebook, which holds ridiculous amounts of our personal information, and has the population of a reasonable sized country, barely manages to get any revenue out of it’s adverts… one day they’re going to run out of money and really turn evil; YouTube is massive, but doesn’t make any money; Twitter, which is growing enormously with recent celebrity endorsements and whatnot, seems to have no way of making money at all, and so on. These are all businesses, capital enterprises, and they all have really rubbish ways of making capital… one day it’s going to go horribly wrong, they’re going to turn on us, and eat our children.
Yesterday marked a year that I’ve been using last.fm and hence have been recording what music I listen to. The data that last.fm collects about you is available for you to use and there are various things floating around that you can do with it. Above you can see a graph of what I’ve listened to in the last year created by lastgraph. I must confess, I’m not entirely sure what we’re looking at here, each colour band represents a different artist and one would think that the height of the band represented how much you’re listening to them, but you see that stretched-out bit between July and September 2008, that’s when I didn’t listen to anything at all, I dun’ get it.
Over the last year I have listened to 11906 tracks from 1373 different artists, which means that I’ve listened to an average of 32.6 tracks per day, and 8.7 tracks per artist, which is less than an album, which is interesting because I think of myself still, even in this post-cd age, as a listener of albums. I think that in fact what this number represents is two types of listening – whole albums and single tracks from lots of different artists – which average out somewhere in between the two.
I used to, when asked that inevitable party question, “what music are you into”, always answer with an “I dunno”, followed by a couple of artists that didn’t feel particularly representative. Now, thanks to last.fm, I can give a definitive list of those top artists, in order:
Radiohead, Tom Waits, The Wave Pictures, Sigur Rós, PJ Harvey, The Chemical Brothers, Björk (I just worked out how to write an umlaut on a Spanish keyboard, woop!), Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, The Knife, Malcolm Middleton, Autechre, Hefner, Arcade Fire, Kenickie, Manu Chao….
But even this doesn’t feel right, for a start it doesn’t represent some fairly large genres, like the wide range of experimental music I annoy my flatmates with (The closest we get here is Autechre) because that’s a large group of artists with relatively low numbers of plays each. And secondly there are some oddities in there, Arcade Fire? I don’t even like Arcade Fire, but I had a very brief flirtation with them around the time of Neon Bible, because they had a video of a song being played in a lift, and an innovative interactive video, and well, the film The Neon Bible (haven’t read the book, I’m afraid) is quite good. And then Kenickie was a brief weepie nostalgic phase.
A lot of the high placed artists have resulted from little phases like this where I’ve overdosed on someone in particular. One wonders how long you have to keep plugging away at collecting these stats before they even out and start to reflect reality. Maybe they never do.
Something that’s interesting about the last.fm music player (which gives you recommendations of new artists based on what you’ve already listened to) is that it seems to find it very easy to get stuck in a rut based on a single play, right now I’m in a two sided rut – Country Music, and Spanish Indie Pop. I don’t know where the Spanish Indie Pop came from, but the Country came from listening to a single Willie Nelson track the other day. Before this particular rut we were in Classical Music zone, I think because I’d listened to some Penderecki.
One more fun interesting fact, in the last year I’ve listened to music by artists begining with every letter of the alphabet apart from Q.
I should probably point out, these are photoshop, which can make anyone seem like an artist
The naked boys are over here by the way.
yesterday I went down to help out at a kid’s art class, because we’re making another animation with them. This time the idea was to record the voices of the kids and then later use the voices to contruct the animation around. We will see how it turns out, though, frankly, this one’s going to take a while to get off the ground, as everybody’s kind of busy right now.
working the morning turned into sitting outside in the brilliant sun having a beer, which turned into lunch with a whole bunch of people, which turned into cocktails, which became dinner, which became going out properly, which finally, at 4.30 in the morning, became dancing along Gran Via like bohemians and blathering on about, among other things, Athena, who stands atop the Circulo de Bellas Artes.
foto by GesarG on flickr
And today I didn’t get much done, apart from draw that picture up the top, and learn a bit more After Effects.
Never let it be said that I’m not good with technology. I broke my laptop again last night, and now have a non-functioning screen. Thanks to the kindness of friends, however, I arrived home this evening with an old external monitor clutched under my arm, and I am now at least semi-functional. And things are under way for repairs to be conducted, which is necessary because I have things to do, things I really have to do.
Tonight, like last Tuesday, I cooked dinner for a bunch of friends. I’d prepared Chocolate Brownies beforehand (thanks Hannah!) and I made Patatas Bravas and a weird vegetable thing that turned out completely not how I expected, but not too badly either.
I’m making this a regular event – a chance for me to practice my Spanish cookery and to pay back a little the kindness I’ve recieved from friends since being here. It would also be good social tomfoolery, except for the fact that I’m so exhausted afterwards that I mainly just stare dimly into space and let the frivolities pass over my head.
And now I’m going to let the covers pass over my head.
Hasta tomorrow.
Most of you who read this probably have picked up by now that one of the children at my school died last week, a big shock for everyone. He was a member of the Atletico Madrid youth team, and the accident which led to his injuries happened while playing for them at the weekend.
So today I went with some of my colleagues to watch the Barcelona vs. Atletico Madrid game, where before the match they held a minute’s silence for him. We were in a noisy bar not conducive to reflection, but the images of the flowers on the pitch and the massive banners bearing his name in the crowd were very moving.
I must confess that I am not much looking forward to work tomorrow.
I’m not going to write anything about Diego, though I taught him a lot last year and occasional this year, and I’ve videos and photos of him and his classmates here on my hard drive, I think the testimonies to him here, that I linked to before, do a much better job than I could:
…making pretty colours
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