“In Granada, I have to buy some new shoes.”
I heard that on dark street corner two nights ago, a sound bite from a German passer-by to her friend. Being German, it came out with a sombre, even tragic tone, sort of like; “In Grrrrenada, I haffto buy som’ new shooze”. I started repeating it to myself in this Nico-esque manner until it developed a dismal Berliner rave-party sample beat all it’s own.

Oompa-boompa-boompa-In Grrenada, I haffto buy some new shooze.
This is the kind of thing that happens when you’re on the road. The internal monologue goes completely haywire and starts throwing odd chunks of data out at you without any warning.
Another great sound-bite, from a young American to his friend. In his hand is a small plastic bag containing a few cookies and a banana;
“You want to take care of this organic material?”
And no; that was not a joke. He was honestly referring to snacks as organic material. Maybe he was on the way to the airport; maybe the terminology of air-travel safety has penetrated the public consciousness so deeply that we look at cookies from the point of view of security experts. Perhaps his cookies were harbouring Colorado beetles, ricin or avian-influenza.
I went to the local art-museum today. Another thing you don’t do at home. Like you like next to a bowling alley and never go bowling. In fact, I personally know that you develop a strong unconscious aversion to bowling in all it’s forms. But, as Dorothy Parker would kill me for saying; “I just love art.” And Central America has some wonderful painters. Painting is not the leper of the art-world here as it is in the conceptually dominated European art world. A woman just won the Turner Prize with some paintings last month and the event was greeted with disbelief. The Channel Four art-critic (who has an upper-class under-bite that’s at least as common as the lack of chin that people associate so much with the British nobility and that he thrusts out earnestly as he speaks, like a spring-loaded till, dispensing opinions) interviewed the artist in a state bordering on disbelief that he was addressing a painter. Her paintings were dreary little geometric compositions in dull ox-bloods and ochres and umbers. The ones in the Leon museum are lavish and lurid and often paradoxically restful. I kept thinking about The Tempest as I walked about; ‘sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not’ and Cezanne and sunshine. I have so much Shakespeare memorized now that you’d think I would miss him. But I regret not bringing him along. Poetry is another thing that you pine for on the road. I recite Will when I’m scared and stressed, when I’m trying to go to sleep and as an ‘opening-out’ mechanism when I suddenly realize that I’m not really ‘seeing’ the things that I’m supposed to be looking at. It fills me with a child’s sense of the possible.
Right now I’m looking at a scene by David Hockney. Metal framed patio furniture burning against a background of iron-red terracotta and cream stucco and the oblique blue parallelogram of a swimming pool. The figures are offstage right now. When they are on; they are also by Hockney; vacant beauty. The kind of people that drove Woody Allen crazy in Annie Hall; “Transplendent” willowy youth. They are nice enough to look at but their voices are a miscalculation; jarringly hard; loud and toneless. They say virtually nothing of interest at any time. One of them is complaining that the other doesn’t contribute enough to her social-networking site: MySpace, or FaceBook or whatever the new mutation is. This is almost worse than watching a couple sitting together having separate conversations on their mobile phones. They are starting to interact entirely on websites, where they collect and display friends like museum exhibits. Friends with whom they do nothing and share nothing, not even their physical presence. They have to meet sometimes, in order to provide the photos to post on the sites. But I’m sure some of them are starting to fake them using PhotoShop. I tried to start seven different conversations of seven distinct subjects yesterday and was, not rebuffed exactly, just absorbed into silence. My leads just sort of, well, like, trailed off into, y’know…kinda’…nothing.
I have a sketch of a nut-brown hippy; mop-topped and bearded, ankle-braceleted and tattooed, supine on a couch watching the FOX News network. On the screen, conservative pundits, powdered and coiffed to the point where they resembled pre-Revolutionary French Aristocrats, shouted talking points at each other. Raised arguments that don’t exist. Discussed buzz-words that were handed down from Roger Ailes’s office this morning. A red-bearded British psychopath called Mark Stein discounted climate change because, you know, the world can’t heat up and cool down at the same time. Oh to be a syndicated columnist. Being described as such is almost like boasting that you have no credentials whatsoever, that you come from nothing and have no area of expertise. I thought that the hippy was practicing some form of media-based tantric exercise: try to watch FOX for an hour whilst keeping your blood-pressure under 200. But no; he was just being entertained. They don’t get angry or scared and they never laugh, though they do smile, or what would have been the point of all those expensive orthodontics? They flash their square, crock-like teeth at each other. They don’t blink much and they walk with a lazy lopey slope. Schlup-schlup-schlup; all around the pool and back to the television or the computer stations. Everything is ‘pretty good’, ‘really good’ or just ‘good’. They don’t use other adjectives at all. God alone knows what goes on inside those little skulls of theirs when they appear to be reading their Dan Brown novels.
Oh God, please let some loudmouthed, fucking nerd check into this place; some fat, brainy cynic with a sick sense of humour. Deliver me from the dudes and the bro’s and the mans. I look like a hermit and I smell like Dylan Thomas's embalmed corpse. I’m on a protest; an ugly protest until the median IQ around here gets up to three figures