Psychadelic Weekend: The Dali Museum and Absinthe

That's right, the clocks are melting, so it must be time for the Dali Museum!

I capped off a strange and surreal week with some strange experiences and accompanying highs and lows.

The first week of the Spanish course ended uneventfully; the Korean girl waited until the last day to request to be moved to a lower Spanish level; had she done so four days earlier, me and the snotty French girl would have moved to a different intermediate class and we all could have been spared the uncomfortable silences that went on during most of the 4-hour class periods.

The teacher was a very good and patient man, and he admitted to me during the third day that this wasn't the most ideal class to be teaching (three people including two who don't talk at all). Nevertheless, we got along pretty well. The only problem with the teacher is that he tried to compliment me by saying I looked like Stephen King at the end of the class. (We had both read his book on writing)

I don't understand why people think that you are paying someone a compliment when you say they look like a famous person. I guess there are worse peole but you would never say to a girl, "hey, you look like Lindsay Davenport!" or "you remind me of Celine Dion!" However, I wasn't too offended because, whatever my aesthetic merits of lack thereof, I really don't see the resemblance. Stephen King doesn't have much (any?) facial hair and his face is a lot more elongated.

But enough Stephen King! For something really scary and twisted, try the Salvador Dali Museum in the Gothic Quarter, a private collection of his lesser known but no less grotesque works of art. In terms of medium and aesthetic ability, Dali is a true "artist", but he seems to have three or four themes or motifs that he returns to again and again and again and again and again and again in his art.

Some of his favorite subjects seem to be:

Blood

People with holes in them.

People with holes in them with blood.

Horses.

Dying horses.

Eggs.

Mutated horses.

Satan/Hell

Corpses and Decay

Unhappy people masks

Unhappy people masks with blood

Mutated Dying Horses.

And of course: MELTING WATCHES!

And then there's just a smattering of crazy weird shit everywhere.

In case you think I'm just mouthing off sans expertise, here are some examples of the works that can be found in the museum:

This is actually the first work of art you see in the collection, when you first arrive. It might not be clear from the picture, but what we have here is some kind of freakish Satanic creature with a burning bush shooting up from his groin, where his dick would be. He's also skeletal arms, bubos on his head and a giant tongue sticking out. Attractive, no?

Here's a Venus/angel statue with a hole in her body (and a triangle head):

Next we have the ol' half horse/half swan hybrid:


And then just a plain old dying horse:

I can't forget the screaming fish man:

And here is Dali doing some his version of the dot on the wall: I think, despite not having background in art, that I can correctly interpret the significance of the giant red dot (hint: its not tomato juice).

And perhaps just to prove that he CAN in fact do "normal" artwork that doesn't make you squirm, one of the pieces in the collection is some kind of fancy take on Don Quixote:

He has a bunch of similar pictures in the collection, with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza being drawn with lines sitting atop horses.

If you want to see more twisted pieces, let me know, and I can e-mail you some more pictures that I took. Or I can post them up here at some point. I have about two dozen more or so.

Friday night people went out for a friend's birthday. We went to this bar in the Gothic Quarter called Manchester Bar which I guess is a "good" bar although I really wouldn't know. I guess it must be good because some people went home very happy.

The next day we went to see a choir concert, which was probably the first time I'd been in a church since I was IN a choir myself, six years ago, doing a concert in Europe on a tour. They sang some songs which I recall having learned back in those high school days. The choir also did a fun rendition of some English songs like "The Circle of Life" and "Bridge over Troubled Water." They did a nice job except when they sand "the path unwinding" they pronounced "wind" like "gone with the wind."

Some people were ribbing me for being in church; I was asked if it was a sin to be there during the service. I told them it was only a sin if I enjoyed it. And although I enjoyed the choir concert, I can't say I got anything out of the service itself, which was done entirely in Catalan. I also was intimidated by the giant bloody Jesus hanging over me off to the side. 

Later that night, having decided that the previous night wasn't exciting enough (for me anyway), people convinced me that the reason was just that I needed to be using harder drugs.

So we went over to an absinthe bar. To get there, we went through the hated Ramblas and down to Raval, a series of back alleys where on one side of the street you can see prostitutes and on the other someone is puking all over the ground. Also, if you're not careful people will drop egg and ammonia off the balconies of homes down on tourists. If this doesn't sound like a place you want to visit...you're just a wuss.

The absinthe bar was "atmospheric", as the walls were lined with old bottles of liquor and the chandeliers were very dusty, which may have been on purpose but it was also gross. The bar was made of wood, and the whole scene would have been perfect if only someone was playing a rag on an upright piano, and there was a bar fight going on in the background.

Drinking absinthe appears to be all about the process of mixing the drink, as they give you the pure alcohol and then you are supposed to melt the sugar, add the water, etc.. That was kind of fun. As for the drink itself, I knew something was immediately wrong when the people in the bar all suddenly had red eyes. I kept on thinking there was water on the floor but my friend next to me assured me it was completely dry. But he couldn't help explain or assure me of anything when the wooden table started to fluctuate in size depending on how I tapped my shoe. We were all having a good laugh about it until my friend sprouted a tree branch out of his crotch and then little green hornets chased us out of the bar, out on the street, where Salvador Dali was playing guitar for money on the side of the road and then I started speaking in tongues until finally the green faerie whisked me away towards her favorite tapas bar in the sky, where unfortunately, there were still more prostitutes, but now there were dinosaurs as well and I started screaming and did not stop until I got on the metro and starting flicking people's noses.

Anyway, that is what SHOULD have happened.

All I'll say about abinsthe is that I should have wikipediad the drink BEFORE I ordered it and then I would have saved myself 5 euros. I'm pretty sure the craziest thing I did while under the influence of absinthe was pop some aspirin before I went to bed. Next time, I'll just take mushrooms and call it a night.