Cecilia Tan's Blog, page 30

Presenting the 2013 Duck Day Menu

So if you’ve been following my Twitter feed you’ve been seeing days and days of prep cooking for our Thanksgiving extravaganza, the annual event corwin long ago named DUCK DAY and which continues every year. We make duck not turkey. This year, because of Chanukah we decided each course should be themed to a separate Festival of Lights of some kind or other winter holiday. So we have the Lantern Festival (China), Festival of Merce (Barcelona), Diwali (India), Thanksgiving (USA), Chanukah (All of Jewdom), Yule (Norther Europe and other cold places).

Menu below the cut! Check my Instagram or Twitter feeds for photos all evening long, and the hashtag is #duckday

http://instagram.com/ctan_writer

http://www.twitter.com/ceciliatan

Duck Day 2013: Festivals of Lights (& Winter)

Amuse: Holiday Gift

A zukesake “present” with gari

Wine: Domäne Wachau Grüner Veltiner 2012 (Austria)

Lantern Festival (China): Twin yuanxiao dumplings

Char Siu Duck

Chive & Water Chestnut

Served with house-made chili garlic paste

Festival of Mercê (Barcelona): Tapas

Duck Ropa Vieja

Cauliflower in saffron batter

Mushrooms • Roasted red and green peppers • Olives

Pan Cubano

Wine: Abel Mendoza Rioja 2012 (Spain)

Diwali (India): Dahl

Pureed lentil soup with shrikhand ice cream

Naan

Cocktail: Palate Uncleanser

Thanksgiving (USA): “Leftovers”

Open faced sandwich of roasted duck breast

on sage bread with sweet potato, gravy, and spherified cranberry sauce

Wine: Domaine Zind Humbrecht Gewurtztraminer 2011 (Alsace)

Intermezzo:

Palate Cleanser of carbonated black gyokuro tea with ginger-lemon grass-lime ice

Hanukah (All of Jewdom): Fried potatoes

Duck fat fried potato chips with three condiments:

Äioli • Apple sauce gelée • Bourbon Ketchup

Yule (Northern Europe & Other Cold Places): “Yule Log”

Cognac flambeed duck roulade with giblet jus

Wild and Red Rice dressing

Haricot Vert

Wine: Giacomo Fenocchio Langhe Nebbiolo 2010 (Italy)

Dishes: The festival of washing!

Dessert:

Sweet potato creme caramel

Gulab Jamun

Parting Gifts: One last holiday gift

Almond Green Tea Financier

Tea, Coffee, etc.

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Slow Surrender Audiobook!

If all went right at Tantor Media, the audiobook of Slow Surrender should be launching today everywhere! It’s available in MP3 format or on CDs, and libraries can get it, too. I think it should be for sale most places audiobooks are sold, including Barnes & Noble .com and Amazon, and here’s a link to where you can get it direct from Tantor Media, where it’s 20% off.

I haven’t heard it yet myself, so please let me know what you think! They hired a professional voice actress named Lucy Rivers to do the narration so I’m sure it’s sweet!

My rant on rape porn, social justice, and misogyny in Garth Ennis THE BOYS

So, this blog post is motivated by my recent reading of Garth Ennis’s THE BOYS Vol. 1: The Name of the Game (graphic novel, compiling issues 1-6 of the comic book), and something crystallizing that writer Hal Duncan said on Twitter regarding his “subtextual beef with certain noir/horror misery porn, e.g. Sin City. Just chanced on: Degeneracy Theory.”

Yes, that was the tweet that crystallized a bunch of stuff in my head, not only about why I have been gnawing at what seems “wrong” with THE BOYS for days now, but about the general rising level of discontent I’ve been having with my media consumption these days, swept along in the firehose of both fandom enthusiasms and social justice rants that is social media. (Tumblr in particular, but Twitter, LJ, and other places, too.)

There’s a tension between two poles of the same magnet here: fandom evangelism at one end and social justice hooliganism at the other, and yes, I use both the words “evangelism” and “hooliganism” in their negative connotations. But I believe these two “polar opposites” really are on the SAME BALL OF WAX. People at the squeeing end hate it when the people at the ranting end harsh their squee, people at the ranting end hate it when the evangelists dismiss their concerns. You’ve seen it before. “I love this movie and it changed my life it’s that good!” “You deserve to die in a fire because the lead actor is a racist.” “OMG this book! I’m naming my children after these characters!” “You should be stabbed in the uterus because misogynist portrayals are the scourge of the universe.” Et cetera. The vast majority of us are somewhere in the middle of the ball of wax and not at either extreme.

You *could* label that all just a lot of bad behavior by people on the Internet, or use it to make a case against any form of extremism, but that’s not my point here. My point here is that this is the polarized environment in which fannish Netizens like myself create and consume media. So that’s the backdrop for this discussion. Is there space in the middle for actual critical discussion of stories, art, movies, books, etc…? Let’s face it: stories are told by people. People are not perfect saints of politically correct perfection. (And if there was a writer who was a perfect saint of politically correct perfection, I expect their books would be boring as shit.) So I think I had better accept there is always going to be problematic art in a problematic world. This essay is my attempt to wrestle with a piece of media I found problematic, and to attempt to apply some critical thinking to it rather than either pretending I did’t read it or that it’s simply not a problem, or telling the writer/fans of the work to die in a fire.

Ahem. Now that the throat clearing is over, I feel I had better establish my cred for this analysis. I’m a dyed-in-the-organic-wool liberal who is pro-choice, pro-gay, pro-sexual liberation, and pro-free speech. I’m a polyamorous, bisexual BDSM practitioner. I am an erotica writer by trade. Heck, I’m not even considered white most places in the world (Chinese-filipino/Irish/Welsh, why do you ask?) I’m about as “alternative” as you can get.

I am also a longtime comic book reader, going back into the 1970s when I bought single issues at the newsstand with my allowance. Once I got to college (1985) I started the weekly pilgrimage to the comic book specialty store. In 1992, when I started grad school in writing, not coincidentally when the bottom fell out of the specialty store market, I switched to buying graphic novels instead. In recent years my focus has shifted to web comics (and then buying the compilation graphic novels of those.)

In those early days of the mid-eighties I was there, every week, being part of the revolution that was taking place in comics. What had been essentially all superheroes all the time, produced by two Big Two (Marvel and DC), was being cracked open by independent artists and companies. “Alternative” was a word getting thrown around a lot then, not just for comics, but for music as well. “Alternative” to what? “Alternative” to the thing defined as “mainstream,” that’s all. Whatever “mainstream” rock and roll was, for example, “alternative” was anything but. The result was that when alternative music acts finally began outselling the mainstream ones so much that it could no longer be ignored by the corporate gatekeepers that we eventually, in the late nineties, reached the stage where alternative WAS mainstream!

But the music industry argument is for another blog (probably for Daron’s Guitar Chronicles…) on another day. Of course we also have the “alternative lifestyles”, where the mainstream is outwardly-appearing vanilla monogamous heterosexual, and everything that isn’t, is labeled “alternative.” Of course the truth is that many couples are not as vanilla, nor monogamous, nor strictly heterosexual as they appear, but the fact that they maintain that appearance is what reinforces the mainstream! So you see, “alternative” comics in the mid-eighties were very exciting for a young 19-year-old like myself, knowing that I was likely headed for living an “alternative lifestyle” (queer, poly, kinky…). No, it’s not a coincidence that the word “alternative” keeps cropping up.

Recall that in 1985, when I started on my weekly comic-book buying habit:

- Mainstream science fiction had “recovered” from its brief foray into (“new wave”) sexuality in the seventies (viz: Samuel R. Delany) and was staunchly “clean.” Gay characters? So few and far between as to be easily labeled the exception (the “alternative”). Sex on the page? None. Oh, except maybe in the case of rape. Of course. More on that later.

- Comic books were still self-censored by the Comics Code Authority. Imagine if the people who give movies G, PG, R, and NC-17 ratings also did comic books, except they only allowed G and PG comics to be published. Anything that would be at the “R” level wasn’t even allowed to be published.

- HIV had just been identified, and a public health crisis was happening. Yet many television programs including newscasts refused to use the word “condom” on the air. Many of these a few years earlier wouldn’t have even allowed the word “gay” to be uttered. Now they uttered it in the context of AIDS and the “gay plague.” Not exactly an improvement, but just one more thing cracking open the lid that the mainstream clamped down on top of the “alternative.”

Into this environment came comics like Chester Brown’s YUMMY FUR, in which a sort-of joke cartoon panel (“The Man who Couldn’t Stop Shitting”) eventually turns into an epic in which his ass is the gateway from another universe and the only way to stop it would be to plug him up… On top of that, somehow Ronald Reagan’s talking head ends up on the end of another guy’s penis… Cue massive anal sex anxiety/analogy because no sane man would allow something up his bum even if it would save the universe, right?) Alan Moore’s Watchmen came in 1986, and not only had “mature themes” in it, its actual subject matter was the dark underbelly of superheroism! Watchmen not only broke all the mainstream rules of comic books artistically (closed rather than open story line, issues with sequential art set up as a palindrome [!], etc) it was deconstructing the superhero mythos. Watchmen demanded that you question the very bedrock of utopian escapist fantasy that the comic book industry in the US was built on. More on that in a bit.

HELLBLAZER, which spun off from Alan Moore’s run as a writer on Swamp Thing, was another of the first “alternative” comics to come from a mainstream publisher. DC Comics. You knew it was “alternative” because it said so RIGHT ON THE LABEL: “Suggested for Mature Readers.” That was the equivalent of a “R” rating on a movie. Hellblazer launched in 1988. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman came shortly after that (January 1989). A ton of these “alternative, but from the mainstream corporations” titles were written by British or U.K.-based writers. Hellblazer’s initial writer was Jamie Delano. I think it was the equivalent of how so many of the “alternative” music acts that led the new wave in music were from the U.K. The Police and U2 on the vanguard of those with massive commercial success in the U.S. (Is it a coincidence that John Constantine, the protagonist of Hellblazer, is supposed to be Sting? Look at the Swamp Thing panel where he first appears and it is essentially lifted right from a Police album cover image. Don’t believe me? See it here: http://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/1442945.html. Or Google “John Constantine is Sting” and look at the Images results.)

Anyway. Fast forward to the next wave of Brit-alternative comic book writers. After Moore, Gaiman, Delano, and Grant Morrison came others. In particular the two who leap to mind for me are Garth Ennis (Irish) and Warren Ellis. Ellis has done a ton of stuff but I still feel his masterpiece is Transmetropolitan (1997), about a violent foul-mouthed journalist pitted against a neatly groomed politician (The Smiler, whom Mitt Romney bore an uncanny resemblance to…). Spider Jerusalem (the journalist) is the distillation of an “alternative” antihero. Covered in tattoos, he’s basically if you crossed Johnny Rotten with Hunter S. Thompson, while The Smiler of course is the mainstream, the suit-and-tie “face.” Set in a futuristic world that is so corrupt that there is a cannibalistic fast food chain (Long Pig) and pornographic sex muppets. (Trust me, it was before YouTube, and the idea of sex muppets was radical at the time. YouTube wasn’t created until 2005.)

Not incidentally, the artist on Transmetropolitan was Darick Robertson. Along with the import of U.K. writing talent came a slew of artists, too. I can speak much less knowledgeably about art and the artist’s role in the comic book creation/collaboration process. Be aware that it’s there.

And this brings me, at long last, to the collaboration between Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson on a series called THE BOYS. Ennis is the writer of Preacher, a series I highly enjoyed, and which is, not surprisingly, another title packed with satirical hijinks, hyperviolence, and social commentary, and somewhat defies easy description, though I’ll try: Preacher Jesse Custer is possessed by a supernatural force and goes on a quest to literally find God and bring him to account, accompanied across the USA by his (ex-)girlfriend Tulip and a “hard-drinking Irish vampire named Cassidy.” (That’s how he’s described on the back of the book.) Let’s not forget international Vatican conspiracy to hide the truth, a rock star named Arseface… you get the idea. “Alternative” as hell and quite a romp.

I picked up THE BOYS curious to see what Ennis was up to next. I like comic books. I even like comic books with hyperviolence and protagonists with questionable moral stances. And THE BOYS seemed yet another postmodern superhero deconstruction, along the lines of Watchmen. But when I finished the graphic novel that collects the first 6 issues, I was left with a nagging sense of dislike. That’s putting it mildly. In my exchange with Hal on Twitter I said that THE BOYS felt to me like “a flat out multi-course meal of misogyny with a side of homophobia.”

So why am I still thinking about it instead of chucking it on the slag heap? I felt I needed to untangle whether it was that the problematic things in the work were too damn problematic OR whether by calling “misogyny!” what I was actually doing was succumbing to the peer pressure of all the social justice ranting. I get it. I’m a crusader and an activist, but I dislike mob justice for many reasons, not the least of which because that’s what a lynch mob is. Ahem. And I don’t like peer pressure when applied blindly and without critical self-examination. I might decide to go along with everyone eventually, but in this case I wanted to give Ennis at least a little shred of benefit of the doubt and think deeper about whether what seems on the surface like rampant, genre-commonplace misogyny and homophobia is actually a deeper commentary. After all, maybe I’m missing something.

Then this morning Hal’s tweet, and something clicked.

Spoilers here to illustrate why the misogyny feels so relentless in this book. Serious spoilers. Let’s see. One of two main characters is an everyman named Hughie whom we first meet in an idyllic “I love you” moment with his girlfriend. Two seconds later she’s dead, killed by the actions of a superhero who punched a supervillian at supersonic speeds. Girlfriend is collateral damage, crushed as if by a freight train. (Did it have to be girlfriend? Could it have been brother?) Our other main character, Butcher, is some kind of shadow operative who used to run a secret team for the government to keep the heroes in check. When we meet him, he’s meeting the female head of the C.I.A. The only reason this character is female seems to be so she and Butcher can have a hate-sex relationship, where every time he sees her he fucks her doggy style while they spout insults at each other: it’s implied this is the only way she can get off. (Could the CIA director have been male with the same hangup? Or would that be bad because it would make Butcher look gay/bi?) Plot device: Butcher’s getting the band back together and our everyman is of course recruited to join up. There’s one female member of the team. She is referred to only as The Female, as in The Female of the Species. She’s a psychotic killer who never speaks, and whom they aim at enemies whose heads she literally rips from their bodies berserker-fashion.

I don’t know if I really even have to try to explain why it might be seen as problematic that the only female in the group has no name and doesn’t speak… HOWEVER, what if it’s actually a conscious commentary on the fact that so many superhero groups have a single female member (hello Pink Power Ranger, Wonder Woman, etc…) whose only function is to give the artist a chance to draw boobs? It’s possible. The Female, as drawn in The Boys (holy crow, is the title even meant to be exclusionary or a commentary on how exclusionary the genre is??) is covered head to toe, wearing a black trench coat, with even her face hidden by her hair. Hmm. So I think she probably is supposed to be a comment on the way female characters are usually portrayed. But…

Contrast her with another female character we meet, a hero who has been called up to the big leagues from her midwestern, American Christian hero group to THE SEVEN (think The Justice League, the ruling, top-tier hero group) to replace a missing member. In the first panel where we see her, the leader hero “Homelander” (think Superman, but blond), is giving her a tour of their Hall of Justice. In that very first panel, I thought, oh, how predictable: now he’s going to rape her. Ennis! What are you doing? Watchmen already did this, and did it better! Sadly, I was right. It’s so telegraphed as she goes on and on telling him, all gushy and starry-eyed, how her hero boyfriend back home and she have decided “to wait.” So she’s a Christian virgin, too! When he finally drops spandex trou and tells her to suck him (maybe preserving her virginity) she recoils in horror, of course. She thinks he’s being mind-controlled by some evil villain. Then some other heroes show up, she think she is saved, but no, they’re there to join in the dick-sucking party. Cut to her puking in the restroom later, where she meets the other female hero, who we learn is a jaded bitch who drinks too much. Later, we see our poor heroine being introduced as a new member of the group and they’ve also redone her superhero outfit to be super-revealing and slutty looking to boot. Okay, I get it, that’s got to be a commentary on the ridiculous slutty costumes superheroines are always given in the genre, right? I don’t know. It felt a little like, welp, someone’s look has to get sexed up. Let’s have a visual representation of how this character is being exploited! In other words… let’s exploit her!

Throw in scenes of a punky “alternative” superhero group having wild sex in a specialty brothel where the whores have to snort a special drug in order to avoid the “women of Kleenex problem.” Oh yeah, the reason Butcher has a vendetta against superheroes? His wife got raped by one. And then the superhuman fetus killed her by chewing its way out.

That’s a pretty big buffet of misogyny and I haven’t even started in on the side dish of homophobia. It’s basically more of the same, in which I strongly felt that sex and sexuality was used in the plot as a big heaping dash of “edgy! alternative! for mature readers!” rather than as a mature exploration of the subject. Or even as a commentary on the lack of mature exploration of the subject elsewhere in the genre.

That’s the thing. I know Ennis is smart. I know he writes multilayered works. But even though I was exhausted by the relentlessness of the misogyny I was hoping to find some subtext to explain to me what was going on with it.

And that’s part of what clicked for me about Hal’s tweet about his “subtextual beef with certain noir/horror misery porn, e.g. Sin City. Just chanced on: Degeneracy Theory.”

“Misery porn,” he called it. Hm. Sounds right. I wrote back about The Boys and he added, “Sorta prudish prurience in squalor?” Yep, that pretty much describes what I got out of The Boys. I then Googled “Degeneracy Theory.” Wikipedia came up:

“As an early illustration, a minority of the French Enlightenment philosophes assumed that the human species might be overtaken by a better adapted species. Degeneration theory presented a pessimistic outlook for the future of western civilization…”

Well, that is certainly The Boys in a nutshell! Humans fear that the superhumans are going to take over, so the human governments indulge them so they can remain in power themselves. Meanwhile, pessimistic outlook for western civilization is pretty much the thread that runs through ALL the “alternative” post-Watchmen comics. Mainstream superheroes are on the utopian end, so the alternative is dystopia. Hello, Spider Jerusalem, et al.

Okay, so, imagine that Garth Ennis has crafted The Boys as a huge artistic commentary on misogyny in the “mature” comics genre. The problem is that even if it is meant to be a commentary, it still exists as an example of the thing itself. Ultimately it comes off as something like the Victorian double-meaning books in reverse, like the pocket booklet you could get that was a listing of all the brothels in New York City that one was supposedly carrying as a way to know what places to AVOID. Riiiiight. And degeneracy theory is a very Victorian concept, too, and the justification for why people need to be saved from themselves. Hal again: “I suspect [The Boys] inherits Victorian morals via the lurid kicks of pulp.” Aha, yes.

Recall that I am an erotica writer for a living. I am affected directly by the fact that there is a kind of prudishness inherent in prurience. This is what I’ve been fighting against my whole life. One of the main reasons why I started writing erotic science fiction back in 1991….well, to be fair, I started WRITING it back when I was a teenager… I have scenes in notebooks going all the way back to junior high school circa 1980… Okay, start over, the reason I started PUBLISHING erotic science fiction in 1991 and founded Circlet Press in 1992 was because I wanted sex scenes in sf/f to EXIST. In particular I wanted sex scenes that were NOT rape scenes to exist.

But look at what I did. Telepaths Don’t Need Safewords, my first story, the story I shot across the bow of the genre the way Alan Moore shot Watchmen, has a heap of consensual BDSM in it. However…

SPOILERS AHEAD (but you’ve all read it already, haven’t you? It’s been roaming wild on the Internet since 1992, and has been reprinted dozens of times, and was in three books of my own…! If you haven’t read it, I’m sure you can track down an archive of it somewhere so you won’t have to pay for the ebook if all you want is to see what I’m talking about…) … however, Telepaths also has a flat-out rape scene in it. No one has ever called me out on it. No one has ever pointed a finger at me and said I was anti-feminist or a bad BDSM activist or what have you because I included a non-consensual scene in it. I think the reason why is because the whole point of the story that people easily get is that it illustrates the huge difference between the consensual and non-consensual. Also the rapist gets his comeuppance so people (correctly) felt the strong moral message I was sending, that rape is wrong and that even if a pretty “slave girl” is paraded in front of you at a sex party, that doesn’t give you the right to touch her without HER permission.

Yes, social media is a place where the anti-rape messages are a refrain you hear over and over again. (Rape is caused by rapists, not by girls drinking, wearing short skirts, or ANYTHING ELSE. Etc.) Should I be amazed that the basic message of my BDSM story from 1991 is being shouted from the rooftops, or saddened that two decades later we still have to shout it? Steubenville, San Diego’s disgraced mayor, etc etc? That’s part of the social media soup we’re soaking in, too.

The thing people don’t talk about very much is whether the rape scene in Telepaths was just as arousing for the readers as the consensual scenes. In fact, they don’t talk about it EVER. I will tell you that one of the underlying messages of the story, for me, was that rape fantasies are okay. But I don’t think most people gave that much thought to the fact that I, as a writer, was just as turned on writing the rape scene as I was writing the consensual scenes. (Don’t tell me you’re shocked to learn erotica writers are turned on by writing. Seriously.) I felt that in order to write and publish an arousing rape scene, though, I had to counterbalance it with a very strong pro-consensuality message.

I know. Not everyone these days feels that need. Some, like 50 Shades of Grey, put their BDSM in a wrapper that says it’s okay to be aroused by the scenes because it’s NOT normal, and the love of a good woman will fix that damaged-by-abuse-himself Christian Grey right up! Such that by the end of the 50 Shades series, they’re married and he’s thrown away the key to the Red Room of Pain. Sigh. I probably don’t have to tell you what a damaging and “mainstream” message that is, in a book that is otherwise dressed up and marketed as “alternative.” (This was why I wrote and published Slow Surrender with a major press, because if someone’s going to cash in on the post-50 “what to read next” wave, it may as well be a BDSM activist–me–who doesn’t portray BDSM as something only “sickos” do. For fuck’s sake.)

But this goes way beyond 50 Shades. The flap last week was that U.K. retailer W.H. Smith shut down its entire ebook site in order to purge certain classes of pornographic works. In particular they were going after (supposedly) father-daughter rape porn that was being tagged (supposedly nefariously by unscrupulous publishers) as “children’s books.” I don’t know if this was some kind of algorithm glitch that they decided to blame on the “filthy pornographers” when it was actually something technical on their end, or if that was just a handy, barely-believable excuse to have a new chorus of “But we must protect the children!” I do know there is a hell of a lot of very depraved stuff being published out there AND that there’s an audience for it. Do I like that the entire erotica industry is suddenly being hurt by the resulting flip-out about the existence of father-daughter rape porn? (Kobo yanked thousands of titles, Amazon has been redflagging, etc…) No. I believe fantasies are fantasies and free speech is an actual right.

(And no, I do not believe what Andrea Dworkin said when she pointed at pornography as the CAUSE of all social ills, including misogyny and actual rape. Dworkin has, thankfully, been largely discredited these days a brilliant thinker who just really really hated sex, and lived at a time when there was zero support for the choices she would have had to make to be a healthy, happy human being. When she formed alliances with the pro-life movement, her “anti-porn, pro-woman” stance was pretty well exposed as a merely “anti-porn” and not pro-anything, I feel.)

Anyway, back to Garth Ennis. Do I believe he has the right to portray all the rapes and crazywomen and CIA directors who like to take it up the ass that he wants? Yes. He absolutely has that right. Do I believe that writers can portray rape in a way that’s arousing and titillating to the reader and STILL send a strong anti-rape message? Yes. I’ve done it.

The question is, do I believe that’s what Ennis is doing in The Boys? Do I believe he’s laying on the misogyny so thick, so heavy-handedly, that is must be part of some kind of ultimate anti-misogynist message?

Unfortunately, no. What I believe is that I want to believe that. But what I actually see isn’t an effective medium for that message, if it’s meant to be there. The serial nature of the work, the fact that readers only see an issue or a few collected ones at a time, means any such message, which would have to be brought in for a landing in the ending, is being lost along the journey. And I’m too sick and tired of how thick he’s laying it on to keep reading. I’m not going to make it to the end to find out if there’s a redemptive message. Ultimately it feels too much like what’s actually going on here instead is a titillating “ooh, lookie that! so horrible! oh yes, oh yes, terribly reprehensible, tut tut, must shake our heads and wag our fingers and that, oh how terrible, there goes another one, tsk tsk” flavor of Victorian prurience rather than the buildup to a redemptive message.

It’s exactly that prurience that leads to both the audience of guilty-pleasures readers who buy the father-daughter porn books in droves AND to the sudden purging backlashes against its existence. And thus, I see no good there.

Barcelona trip Day Six (St. Pau de Mar, Figueres, Girona)

Swimming in the Mediterranean

Picnic Lunch

Dali Museum in Figueres

Drive to Girona

A couple of observations about Spanish hotels. Every hotel we’ve been in other than the Travelodge which was bare bones has had exactly three closets, two for hanging clothes and one with drawers in it, a desk with flatscreen TV (which we’ve never turned on), and an ass-washing station in the bathroom. It’s remarkable uniformity across several price levels, cities, and types of accommodation. Also, there are no washcloths in this country. I wouldn’t have even noticed this but corwin uses one and he finds it annoying. Fortunately, there is often a small towel provided for the ass-washing station, and he’s been using that.

Got up this morning and Kate swam in the Mediterranean, while corwin and I just waded, having not remembered bathing suits. The beach has very coarse sand and lots of interesting pebbles of many colors and types of minerals, as well as many skipping rocks. After our dip in the sea, we packed up and turned our attention to, what else, food. At 11:30 it was after breakfast at the hotel and the lunch service didn’t start until 1:30. We wanted to be on the road by then, so we walked down by Carme’s restaurant where there are other little shops. So we had a picnic by the water instead: Fresh-baked bread and sweets from a bakery, freshly slices ham and olive loaf and a hard cheese from a charcuterie/butcher, and tuna, olives, white asparagus, tomato juice, chocolate milk, and black truffle potato chips from a small grocery. One moment of comedy in the butcher shop when I was trying to get only 50 grams of Iberian Ham, not 100, and couldn’t remember the word for 50, and the closest I could get was 43. Why 43? Because we drink a lot of Licor Cuarenta y Tres (the vanilla liqueur) at home.

Then we got on the road to Figueres to see the Dali museum. There are three Dali museum sites in this area, I think including his childhood home, and it would have been neat to see Cadaques, which is in so many of his paintings. But that was farther, and in Figueres is the big museum that Dali himself built.

The Dali Museum is described in the brochure as “the largest Surrealistic object in the world.” It definitely has Dali’s sense of absurd showmanship. The museum is built on what was a theater smack dab next to the church where Dali was baptized. The theater was bombed out during the war, so it became a perfect site to build a museum.

Interestingly enough, most of Dali’s really mind-blowing works are, of course, not here, because they were bought long ago by collectors. The Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, has a much more impressive collection of his masterworks and well-known works. But this museum has an eclectism that reflects Dali himself, including some amusing installations like the living room that turns into a face when viewed from above, and also a moving series called Aliyah which was a large series of color lithographs on the independence of Israel.

There were also works by other painters who seemed highly influenced by Dali, Valles — whose paintings involving the sky and tiny tacks (yes, tacks) filled a whole hallway, and Pinxot — whose thing seemed to be painting piles of rocks that looked like women, including some that were meant to be quoting famous paintings.

The worst part about the Dali Museum is how damn crowded it was. There were giant tour groups of 30+ people, with tour guides speaking Russian, Greek, French, etc… and it’s not a spacious museum. It has lots of nooks and crannies and hallways. It was the complete opposite of our visit to the Museum of Music in Barcelona, where we were almost the only people there

There is also a special exhibit going on right now of jewelry and gems designed by Dali that was quite amazing, including things like a pomegranate-seed heart made of rubies that beat. I’ll post some photos later. Some I couldn’t photograph with the iPhone because the light was so bright and the glare off the gems so intense.

We spent several hours looking into every nook and cranny and then were very tired, so we paused to refresh ourselves at a tapas bar called Servits, which described itself as “gastro tapas.” We only ordered six small plates but as it turned out we ordered so many rich things that we barely finished. I think we all felt we needed a break from the large meals we’ve been having. Even though that was only 7pm (dinner time in Spain is more like 10pm, so that was merely a snack) we decided we probably weren’t going to try to get another meal once we got to Girona. (Around 11pm we did go down to the hotel bar for a drink and corwin had a grilled chicken and vegetables sandwich.)

We went to bed early and I’m typing this the next morning as corwin and Kate are sleeping in. I slept nine hours already and they’re getting some extra. We’ve been doing so much we needed the rest! Today we’ll explore Girona until sundown and then drive to Olot where we have a 9pm dinner reservation at Les Cols.

Sagrada Familia Photos (a few of them)

Here are a few photos from our trip to Sagrada Familia. I took over a hundred, but here are about a dozen.

Under the cut:

Yes, it really looks like that.

corwin on the bridge from one tower to the other. We went up in the Tower of the Nativity and climbed down the two next to it.

Cecilia and Kate and a random guy who amusingly referred to himself as the random guy who will be in our photo forever.

Now you see why I describe Sagrada Familia as built by dwarves, decorated by elves.

More of the basilica of Sagrada Familia.

View up the tower from the bridge entry.

The interior of the tower.

Another shot of the interior of the tower.

One of the things you can see really well from the tower is the fruit baskets on the roof. Yes, fruit baskets.

Looking out at the outside world from within the tower.

corwin and Kate included for scale.

As you climb down and down eventually you get to a final spiral staircase...

Looking up the spiral staircase at corwin and Kate!

Barcelona Day Five (Cardona to St. Pau de Mar)

DAY FIVE

We started the day today in Cardona with the traditional huge Parador breakfast buffet. I also had another long hot bath upon waking up while corwin and Kate were still asleep. Third bath of the trip. My muscles are really sore from all the walking and walking and walking so the hot baths have really helped that. Plus, hey, nothing says “I’m on vacation!” better than spending an hour doing nothing but… nothing.

I thought maybe today would be the first break in our string of perfectly sunny days, because when we woke up it was completely overcast, foggy, and misty. But it being the mountains, as soon as the sun hit its peak around noon the fog burned off and left us with a completely blue sky. It’s been absolutely perfect every day so far.

After breakfast we stowed our luggage at the front desk and went to visit the salt mine in Cardona which can be very easily seen from the castle we were staying in. We had no idea what to expect. As it turned out, it was a really cool underground tour inside the mine. Salt is beautiful. We were not allowed to take photos for a lot of it, but there was one large underground cavern (the “Sistine Chapel” they called it) where we could. (Once I get somewhere that will allow me to connect to my websites again I’ll post some more photos from there…)

tl;dr — the salt mine was way cool and way better than expected.

And then we went back and did the actual walking tour of the castle where we stayed, after which we were hungry, so we had lunch on the terrace by the Torre de la Minyona (Tower of the Maiden). And then we hit the road for the seacoast, which is where we are now.

We are at the Hotel Gran Sol, with a beautiful view of the Mediterranean Sea from our room balcony. Kate is sitting on the balcony itself sending some email. I’m writing this blog entry. I can’t actually post it, though, since the hotel’s internet blocks me from my website because it’s GASP! pornography!! Sigh. I put in a request to the service provider to change the designation, and I actually got an email back saying they had reclassified both Daron’s Guitar Chronicles and ceciliatan.com as “Personal Blog or Website” but it takes an hour to take effect. Sigh. It’s been almost an hour and nothing. I won’t hold my breath.

LATER:

Six hours later and the supposedly reclassified websites are still coming up “porn.” Sigh. All it really means is that I can’t post the fantastic photos I took of the mind-blowing meal we just had at Carme Ruscalleda’s Restaurant Sant Pau.

The meal goes easily into the top ten best meals I’ve ever eaten, and might crack the top five if I think about it hard. In that top ten list I include my first meal at Marcus Samuelsson’s Aquavit and last summer’s trip to Moto in Chicago. The wow moments in this meal were no less numerous as they were at Roca Moo a few days ago, but they were sometimes from more subtle elements. It’s rare for me to not be able to identify most of the ingredients in something, but Carme Ruscalleda so perfectly blends and balances things that I not only couldn’t pick out the separate elements in some sauces and dishes, I didn’t want to.

Since we had the wine pairing, I’m way too out of it and sleepy now to write up the meal. It takes a lot of things to another level.

One thing that seems to be on the amenities of fine dining at this level in Spain: purse care. At Roca Moo they brought us special hooks to attach out purses to the table with, and at Ruscalleda, they brought tiny wicket stools for bags to sit on at our feet.

The moon is up, meaning we now have moonlit Meditteranean Sea below our window. I’m going to sleep with the sound of the waves washing on the beach and a very full stomach.

Tomorrow: Giron, where we couldn’t get into Celler Can Roca. We might drive to Figures to see the Dali stuff there before backtracking to Giron. We’ll see.

Barcelona Trip select pic spam – best photos

I’m writing this from the Parador de Cardona, which is a castle, and Kate cannot get over the fact that we are IN A CASTLE. Yes, it’s fun, and the whole reason we took this leg of the trip. :-) (Because Kate wanted to stay in a castle. Not because we knew how cute she’d be about being in a castle.)

The wifi here seems a little better and less saggy than in the city, so I’ll try uploading a few of the best photos from the trip so far. Under the fold:

I had 15 minutes of Free WIFI in Charles DeGaulle Airport and I used it to Instagram a macaroon.

Our super cute modern room at the Travelodge. I slept on the skinny little bed in the corner. Finding hotel rooms in Spain that sleep three people was quite a challenge.

The view from our Travelodge window, Sagrada Familia on the left, the Agbar Tower on the right.

Cinematographers call this a "god ray." Gee, I wonder why. Catedral in the old city.

Razor clams ready for eating at the Mercat de la Boqueria. Most delicious clams ever.

Kate eating from the plate of assorted grilled mushrooms we got at Mercat de la Boqueria. Nom nom nom.

The shop on La Rambla of confectionary genius Christian Escribá.

The confection known as "La Rambla," with ganache so glossy you can see your reflection in it!

The Gaudi sea creature tiles outside Casa Batlló.

Another version of the Gaudi tiles, by the Metro.

Casa Battló! Will post more from the interior later.

The open kitchen at Roca Moo.

I’ll have to post photos of Sagrada Familia, the interior of Casa Battlo, and other stuff later. Must get to breakfast now before it closes at the Parador!

Barcelona Day Four: Food and a Castle (Cardona)

DAY FOUR

Well, I’ve got two things to write about today, food and food. Wait. I mean food and a castle. corwin and Kate slept in while I got up to write up what happened on days 2 & 3. I had a nice hot bath to start the day and relieve the kinks and sore muscles from all the climbing and walking, then went down to the lobby to write and use the free wifi.

I must say I highly recommend the Travelodge Poblenou as a great budget hotel in Barcelona. It was built recently so everything is new. It’s a bit bare bones but for comparison a four-night stay package there cost about the same as what a single night in a medium-high quality place would. They have a breakfast buffet for 7,50 euro, free wifi in the lobby, free luggage storage, a 24 hour bar (! yes!). The room was impeccably clean, the pillows firm and the mattresses good. The Poblenou neighborhood turned out to be a gem, not touristy, very nice, safe, and full of charm, too. Five stars, would stay again.

Once we got going today, we had another pass through Boheme bakery to try a bunch more things. A crispy, chocolate dipped “angel hair” pastry (not the ensaimada, more of a crisp fried twist), a chocolate flauta (flute), a brioche, I can’t even remember what else. That was supposed to tide us over until we could get the rental car. But we trekked via transit all the way to Sants rail station to the pickup office only to discover that corwin needed his passport (as the driver) and he had left it packed in the luggage we had stored at the Travelodge. So we trekked back to the Poblenou, decided to have lunch, and ended up having a three-course prix fixe at the place that had become our favorite in the neighborhood, La Biennal. For 10,50 each we got a starter, main dish, and dessert, with coffee/tea and a beverage! (The beverage alone was 3,50 each for sparkling water sometimes.) We feasted on eggs stuffed with tuna, a tomatoey lentil & potato stew, a fish soup, “secrecto iberico” grilled pork, whole mero (which the Internet says is grouper), and filet of dorado (which the internet says is mahi mahi). And rice pudding and a banana cake that was more like a banana flan on chocolate cake. Yum.

We then succeeded in getting the car but the drive to Park Guell was a bit of a disaster, as we could find nowhere within a mile of the park to park, so we ended up giving up and going back to the hotel to retrieve our bags and heading out of town having accomplished only one thing on the day: lunch.

The drive to Cardona was lovely, through the mountains. We saw some amazing mountains on the way including one that looked like dragon’s teeth.

And it was just sunset as we were driving up the steep steep mountain to the castle that is our night’s destination. The Parador de Cardona was a real castle and large parts of it are now in use as the parador (inn). We checked in, wandered down to the bar for a drink of local moscatel on the stone terrace, and then to dinner.

The waiter seemed to think we were ordering too much food. We convinced him to bring it anyway. Seafood soup with clams, hake, monkfish, lobster, and prawns, cod three textures: bacalao confit, fried, and creamed with potatoes, and a veal filet with foie gras on top. That was after starting with a cured meats platter, cream of leek soup, and melon and duck proscuitto salad. To finish we had whiskey cream and an almond cake with moscatel. And I had a Pu-Ehr tea that surprised me how good it was given that it came in a tea bag. Earthy and strong, it was the perfect thing to cut the sugar of the dessert and to linger over while we caught the parador’s wifi in the dining room.

Then we walked around exploring the castle in the dark. It’s lit dramatically with upturned lights and not really meant to be walked around at night, but we didn’t much mind. In the distance we could hear a pack of dogs howling and barking, and see bats flitting about and hear their intermittent sonic chirps. The moon was rising. It’s only a partial moon but still quite bright.

Tomorrow we’ll tour the actual castle and probably the salt mine we can see from one side of the balconies. And then we’ll drive from the mountains to the seashore of St. Pol del Mar (Sant Pau De Mar), where the restaurant of Carme Ruscalleda is located.

Barcelona Day Three

DAY THREE

Sagrada Familia

Museu de la Musica

Casa Battló

B Lounge

We started day three of the trip, a Sunday, eating breakfast at La Biennal, the place where we had tapas our first night here. We wanted a substantial meal since we knew we were going to try to do Sagrada Familia and a thing at 3:30 at the Museu de la Musica and didn’t know if a proper lunch would be fit in there.

Sagrada Familia, amazing. Simply amazing. If cathedrals are meant to be awe inspiring, this is a space that when you enter it makes you feel as if you have entered another world. It feels like elves from Middle Earth built it. Or maybe the dwarves built it but the elves decorated it with glass and light and I’m getting goose bumps just remembering it. Photos do not do it justice.

One of the tickets you can buy is a special ticket to go up INSIDE the towers. You ride an elevator up and then you can go back and forth between two other towers on the way down. You can take as much time as you want. I think we were almost two hours climbing around in the towers. It takes some time because you have such borderline-vertigo from how out of your element you feel that you have to. At least, that’s how I felt. It’s not a rational thing. It’s a visceral thing where my knees get weak and don’t work right. You get amazing views of the city through the slots and even better ones of all the fruit basket sculptures on the roof of the cathedral.

After we climbed down we wandered the main basilica. A wedding was going on in a small chapel downstairs. And then, because it was Sunday I guess? everything closed at like 2:30, including the shop and the museum, so we didn’t get to see those. But we were pretty much “full” from the experience.

If you’re religious at all, I recommend it, because you will believe the holy spirit is filling every nook and cranny of that place. If you’re not religious, go to be awed by the intense beauty that human beings can create here on Earth. It was beautifully sunny when we went which was a great time to see it, because the whole space is alive with light and color.

From there we walked to the Museu de la Musica, which is inside a performance complex called L’Auditori. We found L’Auditori completely deserted, and the museum almost deserted. This meant we had the museum to ourselves, pretty much, which was delightful. The package we bought included a 30 minute tour and lecture about the guitar collection at the museum, and a 30 minute classical guitar concert.

What a delight. The tour guide named Isabel was funny and engaging, and with just three of us we could ask her lots of questions (and sometimes stump her on English). The guitars were of course amazing, drool-worthy, and I learned some things about the development of the guitar I didn’t know. For example, no one knows really when the guitar was “invented” and that the precursors of the stringed instrument we know of probably go back so far that we will never know. One reason we think it goes back so far in human history is that the word “guitar” seems to have ancient analogs in languages as disparate as Japanese, Arabic, and Spanish.

They have some early guitars that have parchment “lace” in their sound holes, like the wood carving on a lute, only more resonant. One of the guitars is made from an armadillo. Another one has a body made from cardboard because a famous Spanish guitar maker wanted to prove it was the wood of the top that made the difference in sound. They have several in the collection that are the equivalent of “Stradivarius” guitars, from about the same era and of the same quality, but she emphasized that at one time nearly everyone had a guitar. (Actually, that’s not that different today…) and that only the very best specimens survive through time. In the rennaissance a guitar cost about what a pair of scissors did.

Then came the private concert where Belisana Ruiz played five fantastic pieces that were very representative of the classic guitar ouvre and of Catalan guitar. Pavane by Lluis del Mila, a suite of variations on the Magic Flute (Mozart) by Ferran Sor, a version of “Asturias,” made famous by Andres Segovia but originally written by Isaac Albeniz, and apparently originally a piano piece. Apparently ever since the Segovia version no one remembers the piano version anymore. If you heard it you’d likely recognize it. And a few other pieces.

That was really lovely and no bones about it.

It was probably 5:00 when we left the museum, and we decided to try Casa Batllo again. This time it was open, and bought our tickets, but then grabbed a quick snack at a “Pans and Company” a few doors down. Pans is a fast food chain but no bad. I had taken a flyer from a very very timid flyer-passer on the street the day before near the Mercat, and so I had some idea what it was. Kate had a nice long skinny salami sandwich. I had a pressed ham and cheese and corwin had a chocolate hazlenut cream filled “Barliner” (berliner) donut.

Then we spent the next three hours in Casa Battlo. The audio guide takes some time to do plus you want to wander around. Having just seen Sagrada Familia was really neat because you see the same architectural idioms of Gaudi’s style at work. The spiral stairs and the windows and nature. Another place that elves lived, but Victorian elves. The house has a lot of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea elements, as well as St. George and the dragon. I don’t even really have words to adequately describe the place. It was a house that Gaudi rebuil/redesigned for a wealthy businessman and his family. Now it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site and owned and maintained by a private family who have made it into a museum, though there are still some private apartments in the building.

We were totally exhausted by the end of that, but it was time to eat a real meal. So we took the Metro to La Rambla and wandered until we found a little rambla called Rambla Raval, where we found an upscale boutique hotel called Barcelo Raval, which has a sort of upscale gastro bistro in its lobby called the B Lounge. Very futuristic surreal decor in line with what you’d find in any other metropolitan city with retro-70s hipster cocktail culture. Miniature foie gras sliders, quail egg gazpacho, “faux” risotto (tiny orzo instead of rice) with a parmesan “cookie”, prawn carpaccio with spherified olive oil. You get the idea. Dessert was a “pina colada” which was some kind of pineapple gelee with chunks of pineapple, freezedried banana pieces, Pop Rocks, etc. Very fun to eat, which was the point. And a set of “ravioli” filled with chocolate and served with hibiscus salt and olive oil “roe” (spherified).

Then we came back to the hotel and all crashed super-hard. I’m writing this now the morning of the fourth day, and corwin and Kate are still asleep!

Today we rent a car, we’re going to try to see Park Guell, and then we drive into the mountains to Cardona where we’re going to stay in a castle tonight.