Brett Hetherington's Blog: "First thought:" My Substack page, page 7

History under foot

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"Here lived Damia Aleixendri Curto, born 1909, exiled, deported 1941, Mauthausen, assassinated, 25.3.1942." 

(My photo of a plaque I found in a street pavement in Vilafranca del Penedes, Barcelona prov. 2022.)

More details here (in Catalan:) https://banc.memoria.gencat.cat/ca/results/deportats/1575

"Greater than skaters" -- My latest article for Catalonia Today magazine

 

​A presentation at the design studio Casa de Carlota for creatives with special needs.

Climate change, habitat destruction, loss of biodiversity, ocean plastics, food insecurity and the list goes on. What can one person do? 

That’s a question that John French has been asking himself for nearly four decades.

He moved to Spain over 10 years ago and says he has found an answer that came from a most unlikely place. John is an artist and teacher now based in Catalonia. He lives with his wife and two children in the Poblenou neighbourhood of Barcelona, which he calls “the street skating capital of the world.” He is coordinator of MOSS Foundation BCN and a board member of MOSS Foundation Australia.

John grew up in the 1970s in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Australia’s second largest city. About 15 years ago, a group of skaters who are now in their 40s and 50s (but still skateboarding) would meet every week to ride the city’s new skateparks. It became known as MOSS or Melbourne Old School Skate Sessions. They had a water project in Africa and would use any money they made from events, competitions or t-shirt sales to build installations to collect rainwater for rural communities in Swaziland, now known as Eswatini.

MOSS is a completely volunteer organisation: no one gets paid and there are no overheads, no office or admin costs and 100% goes to the cause. It connects one community – that of skaters – with communities in developing countries by heeding their calls for support. MOSS works to meet their basic need for safe drinking water by using the talent and imagination of artists in Australia, Spain and beyond. By pulling these strands together, MOSS has funded over 25 water projects.

John says: “Every few months I visit the local skate shops and collect old decks [the plank-like part that the skaters stand on] no matter how trashed they are. I cycle home with 10 or so boards strapped to my bike rack and they are stored and recycled at the Instituto Barri Besos high school near La Mina in Barcelona. The school director Oscar Tarrega has been fantastically supportive. I have also encountered wonderful people like Wagner Gallo Rodrigues from Al Carrer skate shop who escaped gang culture in his native Brazil through skateboarding and managed to make it to Europe. He feels so indebted to skating that he is keen to put something back. He helps out preparing boards for the artists. Sara Millan also plays an important role liaising with the artists and delivering the decks.”

The process is this: the old skateboard decks that would otherwise go to landfill get restored in the school’s woodwork room. Usually the decks are so trashed that they are covered with a canvas – this material is also recycled from the folding sun shades from the city’s café terraces – then, once covered, or sanded, the decks are primed with gesso, labelled and ready for the artists to use.

After the first BCN show last year at Urban Addict, things are now set for a larger event opening on November 25 at Barcelona street art gallery, Base Elements, in the Gothic Quarter. Despite the 12 hour time difference, the Barcelona show will coincide with the Melbourne exhibition with decks specially created by 150 international artists to be sold online using an app. Once the bidding starts it then takes part all around the world. Some decks will sell for as low as 90 euros while those crafted by more established names can sell for thousands of dollars.

A UN report listed MOSS as the principal organisation supporting people in Swaziland in their struggle to adapt to the climate crisis. “So,” John says, “it seems that we’re doing something right and that in itself is empowering.”

MOSS are on Facebook, Instagram and Linkedin @mossfoundationaskaters. They respond to all enquiries.

(This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine (Nov. 2022) and was co-authored with John French.)

Video: "Chaos in the UK! with Yanis Varoufakis..."

"Rishi Sunak has taken over as British PM, the richest-ever person to hold the job. He’s already promising austerity for the poorest, with public services like the NHS in danger as never before.Sunak’s appointment comes after the disastrous Liz Truss (who was outlasted by a lettuce at 44 days), and the scandal-ridden premiership of Boris Johnson. What can British people – and those around Europe – expect from this latest (unelected) Tory government? And with a Labour Party incapable of representing common people, should progressives be adding to calls for early elections? "

"Ana Gutiérrez, a forgotten resistance hero"

My friend, the wonderful British writer and journalist David Baird shared his knowledge of the maquis in the Frigiliana area of Malaga province (where he has lived since the 1970s) to help with this radio documentary.

From the source:

"The protagonists of history do not always appear in textbooks. Some have joined the ranks of those who anonymously give the best of themselves to change the course of life. This is the case of Ana Gutiérrez, "la Tangerina," tireless fighter for freedom in the darkest of the Francoist night.

RNE [Spain's Radio National] explores her eventful life and her whose determination in the defense of her ideals, like something out of a movie script.

Born in Tangier, Ana Gutiérrez was already a member of the Unified Socialist Youth before she came of age as an adult. For this she was arrested and paid for it with two years in prison and exile.

Forced to leave her hometown, she took refuge in Malaga, where she continued her militancy and took on more risky assignments, including spying and propagandist. Another two years in prison were the price to pay for her insistence on maintaining her struggle.

After being freed, Tangerina returned to the underground, this time as a supporter of the maquis settled in the mountains of the Axarquia in Malaga. There she also experienced a romance with Roberto, the legendary leader of the anti-Francoist guerrillas. For her it meant again two years in jail; but for Roberto, the [execution] wall.

After leaving prison, Ana Gutiérrez, still young, decided to rebuild her life, went into exile in Switzerland, got married and started a family. 

She lived there until, after her retirement, she returned to Spain and went to live in Nerja, in a house whose terrace overlooks the mountains where she risked her life for her ideals.

This documentary, with the agreement of Ricardo Aguilera, has had the invaluable collaboration of Salvador Magaz, son of Ana Gutiérrez, who has preserved a valuable body of documentation, key to the development of our work, and which is already the object of desire of historians. 

We are also accompanied by José María Azuaga, professor and researcher of the anti-Francoist guerrilla. 

In addition, we have counted with neighbors in the area and experts in the history of the maquis, as Adolfo Moyano or the British journalist and writer David Baird, both based in Frigiliana, who expand our knowledge about the guerrilla and its international context. 

The writer Mariví Ledesma, author of "La memoria olvidada" (Forgotten Memory), explains the harshness of those years. Vicky Fernández, neighbor of El Acebuchal, one of the villages that suffered the most repression during the war against the Maquis, gives us her testimony, as well as other elders of the area such as José Ávila, from Cómpeta, and Sebastián Martín, from Frigiliana, who keep a vivid memory of all that.

Thanks to all of them we have been able to recreate the circumstances in which Ana Gutiérrez, the Tangerina, wrote her story of courage and dedication that does not appear in any book."

Mentissa : Et Bam (live @Gare du nord) Paris.

 
The human voice at its best. Singing live to an audience. Strong and brave and tender.

"Early doors day" -- A poem

 (This poem was first published in Burrow here at Old Water Rat’s Publishing )

soft lines
of fog trees

not the desert
but quiet like the desert

we look at the stars to see
what we come from

body not yet the enemy
light slowly befriends you

"It has now come to this" -- My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

Cars and vans parked in a street. QUIM PUIG.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, Oct. 2022.]

The following is based on current and factual information…

How would you fancy sleeping in a car or a van?

Rather than the now antiquated 20th century idea of having your own bed in something as outdated as a house, for the price of two euros a day our new business in Barcelona will fulfill this fantasy for you. And for only 60 euros a month on a prime real-estate public street!

Naturally, there are those in the city council who want to curb your right to get your shut-eye shut out of buildings but they just don’t understand an adventurous spirit. Don’t let them tell you what to do and where you can and can’t do it. You work hard every day and you deserve what we call a “micro space” to match your macro dreams.

We are opening in a small, quiet and almost-deserted square in the Sant Andreu district. In the same location you can rub shoulders with customers of our beehive flats. On top of all that, for a mere 90 euros per month you can go inside, hang out on a plastic chair for the entire day, have a shower, store food, use the complimentary microwave, or even wash your clothes. Now that’s what we call livin’, baby!

Yes, it’s true that those small-minded lefty bureaucrats in the council have assured everybody that our operation won’t actually be legal but in the meantime you can make us your home. We’ve traded in the semi-legal shadows for years so we’re at home with that, even if you’re not!

OK, it’s not exactly what most people call home and it’s temporary but let’s not quibble about semantics. You need a mattress and we can rent you one. That’s just free-market capitalism in operation and who should stand in the way of your good night’s sleep. So, wind up the windows, click the locks on the doors and snuggle up for sweet dreams!

Oh, and another thing that you don’t need to concern yourself with. We admit that municipal tow trucks have already taken some of the sleeper vehicles away but this is just a minor inconvenience. In the unlikely event we are discriminated against again in this way, we’ll refund half of your fee and find you another vehicle to nod off in. You can’t say fairer than that, can you?

As for our premium accommodation we even have a waiting list for others to live in homes that are no bigger than three square metres. We acknowledge that at the moment those are also prohibited in Barcelona but they’ve got them in Japan and “anything-goes Madrid” so why not here too?

I know you’ve heard stories of paper thin walls and hearing other people’s alarms going off and being kept awake by neighbour’s snoring…but just relax. Humans can get used to anything. Eventually.

The truth is as simple. You just don’t have a right to human-sized accommodation anymore. Society can’t deliver this to everyone so some people need to learn that they aren’t lucky enough to be comfortable, secure or well-housed. A lie-down bed isn’t a right, it’s a privilege!

Destinations and returns

In Slow Travels in Unsung Spain, I needed a destination. 

One of the reasons I wrote the book was this man, the great author, Antonio Muñoz Molina. 

In Andalucia's Ubeda, his first hometown, I talked to one of his family then turned and headed to my own home in Catalonia. 

The long way.

(Read more of my latest book here.)

I was humbled by this...

 

Lovely sentiments about Slow Travels in Unsung Spain by a reader this week. 

Thanks a million, Emma!

Baldwin's Barcelona -- My latest article for Catalonia Today magazine

(Photo: Allan Warren)

The book must always come before the author,” said Nobel Prize winner, VS Naipaul. 

Unlike another genius such as James Baldwin, Napaul spent his entire brilliant, vicious life seemingly trying to prove himself wrong.

For Baldwin, words came first. By becoming a child preacher in his native New York City he avoided the Harlem ghetto.

He also soon found the power of images and a sense of himself as gay and American, an American “negro”: the mid 20th century polite English word for “black”.

(I remember the shock of hearing the other, offensive ‘N-word’ when my cousin in Sydney used it as the name for his pet dog. I was seven years old at the time but even then somehow I knew how wrong that was.)

On a wider tour of Iberia, Baldwin (who died in rural France in 1987) came to Barcelona six decades ago last May.

He met the poet Jaime Gil de Biedma and stayed in his basement in Carrer Muntaner – “blacker than my reputation,” he called it – and they spent seven frenzied days together with [current mayor of Hijar] Luis Marquesán.

Biedma wrote in his diary: “Life, since Monday, when I met Jimmy Baldwin, has been so hectic that today I find myself in a state of real moral and physical exhaustion, aggravated by the intellectual dullness that comes with an alcoholic regime such as the one I have been following.”

According to Marquesán’s biographer, Miguel Dalmau, they went to the picnic areas of Montjuïc, “where they saw the landscape of misery, the shantytowns in disarray on the mountainside.” Ultimately it all led to Baldwin’s new friend Biedma questioning himself about whether he was a coward.

Despite the stimulating week, it seems fair to say that the Catalan capital was a place of mixed fortunes for Baldwin.

As reported in this magazine in October 2019, the publisher, Lumen, “had asked Barcelona photographer Oriol Maspons to advise on publishing the book ‘Nothing Personal’ by James Baldwin and Richard Avedon, but his advice was ignored.

Hurt, he and other photographers published a signed ad in the magazine Destino, criticising the indifference shown towards a masterpiece dealing with the US’ racist and classist system.”

Fortunately though, one of Baldwin’s books, ‘Beale Street Blues’ has finally found its way into a Catalan translation, thanks to the publisher Edicions 1984 and the work of Oriol Ampuero.

He launched it along with professor and writer Josep-Anton Fernàndez on June 13 at the Sants bookshop La Inexplicable.

Baldwin’s work, like so many others, was censored in Spain during the Franco years, but Barcelona played another part in his local history when the US writer Nicholas Boggs was a recent writer-in-residence at Jiwar on Carrer Astúries (founded by two Barcelona residents, Mireia Estrada Gelabart and Moroccan-Canadian Ahmed Ghazali). Boggs spent his time co-editing and writing the introduction to a new edition of Baldwin’s ‘Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood.’

He is also continuing work on his manuscript in progress about love and race in Baldwin’s life and work at the Department of English at New York University.

I share Boggs’ fixation. It knocked me sideways when I read Baldwin’s novel, ’Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone’, during lockdown in spring 2020 and I’ve barely left his words untouched since then.

Reading James Baldwin (or listening to his captivating voice) is like having a fogged-up window wiped clean. Now the view can be seen for what it is, whether picturesque or hideous.

Baldwin’s penetrating work, too, is now starting to be seen more and more for what it is, both in Catalonia and across the wider planet.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, Sept. 2022.]