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Canadian sun gods

A. and I have become slightly obsessed with Canadian Sun Gods, after a couple of them shared our hostel dorm room. They’re tall and blonde, with beautifully sculpted figures coloured by a warm tan, that just makes you want to slide into bed with them – especially when they’re lying there asleep with very little clothes on and just a thin sheet modestly hiding their important bits. These are good, hearty boys to the bone – one had two towers of canned tuna on his bedside table, the other a Christian book of inspiration, and both were immaculately neat, even making their bed on the day of checkout.

We rarely had the chance to speak to them – our lives simply didn’t coincide. While these clean souled, glowing with golden masculinity specimens of beings were playing competitive volleyball in the city all day, we were sleeping off a night of hardcore clubbing and other midnight debauchery. It was a case of polar opposites – they the disciplined, righteously healthy, morally upstanding Sun Gods, we the dirty dark Princesses of Night, fueled on a dangerous consumption of hedonism with self destruction, no club closes without our presence.

We’d like to see them try our marathon… an exercise regime of shopping all day, club hopping all night, little sleep, two meals a day, all the excess… then we’ll see who’s tough!

I said to A. I bet they smelled great. Like wood, like freshly cut grass, like newly tilled earth, like a cool ocean breeze, like summer rain. When we awoke to find them checked out one morning, A. went to their pillow and inhaled deeply – “It really does smell great!” I jumped into the bed and wrapped the sheet around me – “there’s no going back to malnourished, sun-deprived, cocaine snorting indie boys now!”


Lesson

Music from Sonar Cycle (Spanish electro band), The Beautiful People (bratty Norwegian indie band), The Chemical Brothers, Jeff Mills (techno at its best!!!), 2 Many Djs (decided these guys really are pretty mediocre, goddamned familiar tune one after the other), Jamie Liddell, Le Tigre (Woop!), The Soft Pink Truth (“Jesus was a homosexual nymphomaniac!”), Munk (excellent pair of German djs), Soulwax, LCD Soundsystem (rocked it), Miss Kittin (can never manage to get into her sets), Luke Vibert, Ellen Alien, Cut Chemist, M.I.A. (my new lesbian lover!). But best aspect of Sonar was the digital and web art – Amazing…

Music from Berlin DJ Hell at VMF, Ariel Pink and Les Georges Leningrad at The Clinic (the latter sounded like their compatriots Errase Errata, very cool), Wolf Eyes at Festsaal (scary industrial art rock).


Berlin

Berlin’s strong and established Art Scene feels different to Barcelona’s. There is something harder, cleaner, meaner, more restrained yet more extreme, less organic and lyrical yet more constructed and defined (none of this, I think, is derogatory or worse, or better, just different).

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly where the differences lie. Is it the way they carefully enunciate all their letters with perfect clarity and unchanging intonation? Is it the ordered neatness and precision of their shop fronts and haircuts and metro system? Is it the flatness of the land, only broken by the huge, square architecture? Contrast this to the narrow and jumbled urine soaked streets of Barcy, where the dark and curly long-locked hair of the Spaniards often flow in messy modern mullets, where the language sings and play is a lifestyle rather than a hobby.

My plans to return to Barcelona to live and work are being backed by plans to do the same in Berlin, too bad I don’t speak the language of either country… ahh, life is an adventure!

In other news,

:: Twice, in two completely different parts of the city I ran into Julian from The Presets.
:: Previously I denounced T-Shirt Slogans, but we’ve seen some great ones in Europe. Including, “Everybody Loves A Jewish Boy”, “Will Fuck For Coke”, “Good Music I Dance, Bad Music I Not Dance”, and the one I purchased from a radio station stall at Sonar “Hang The Dj!!”
:: I lost my I-pod cover and have been using a stripy coloured sock in its place.
:: There are an unusual number of Americans here in Berlin. Why?


Doing the Tango

Just letting you know I’ve stuck up another lot of photos, here.

Is there any dance more sexy than the Tango? This scorchin’ young twosome were busking in the wonderful main park of Madrid. Their dancing was hotness personified…well it had me going.

Actually the Flamenco comes close. Don’t ever pay to see Flamenco in Spain, it erupts spontaneously after hours at clubs or at the height of a birthday party – and is much better that way. The slow burning intensity of the drag of a foot across the floor, the percussive stamps while the crowd erratically claps in time, fiery flicks of the wrist and tosses of the head, and the expression of intense pain mixed with pleasure – pure sex!


Lesson

San Sebastian is a very pretty, idyllic, beach town near the border between Spain and France. What with its surf beach and further down a wider stretch of gold sand and calm blue sea for the families and old folk, it caters to both the young backpacker types and the richer holidaymakers. It is in this way that is reminds me of the (new) Byron, and is probably why there are so many Aussies here. And while Byron can’t compare to the grace and class of the Spanish architecture which makes San S’s streets and buildings so pleasing to the eye, through its exploitation of its hippie roots I suppose Byron appeals with a different angle.

San S. is a ‘rich’ city, resistant to too much growth and development, protective over its carefully maintained suburbs. For such a small city (150 thousand), it has fantastic shopping (not necessarily cheap or anything) and the best tasting, most inventive tapas I’ve had in the country. Stay at the excellent Enjoy (Lo-lo Urban House.)


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