Caroline Yes

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Palais Royal

Madrid, Spain

November 2010

Ordination a San Francisco el Grande Basilica

Madrid, Spain

November 2010

Margot & Kate

Madrid, Spain

November 2010

golden handcuffs

Madrid, Spain

November 2010

comida

Madrid, Spain

November 2010

corners

Madrid, Spain
November 2010

this little piggie went to market...

Madrid, Spain

November 2010

castles in the sky

Madrid, Spain

November 2010

Madrid, 11/27/10

The club is called Hot and Nasty or something like that and it is totally hot and nasty. We can barely get the van down the street that it's on and the place is already filled with cigarette smoke at 4 in the afternoon when we show up for soundcheck. We backline our newly borrowed gear and then I slip out and take myself on a sojourn back down to the Musea Prado, which Margot & Kate & I had skipped earlier to go see Guernica at the Reina Sophia. Being alone in the city makes me feel so free and so alive I literally feel like I am walking on air. I buy Chris a cheesy bullfighting poster in the park and totally kill knowing exactly where I am. The museum is heavy with violent and grotesque pre-Renaissance Christian art that is beautiful and suffocating. I plow my way through the Friday night crowd to find The Garden of Earthly Delights and I let myself get lost in it. It feels like a literal portal to the cultural imagination of another time and place and simultaneously like a blueprint for all the spectres of Christianity that continue to haunt the corners of our western world. I rush upstairs to see Goya's Black Paintings and the 2nd & of May and just as I reach the room they cordon it off and people start flowing out of the museum. I absorb the scenes of revolution that went down right outside our hotel from behind the velvet rope and my mind and my body feel perfectly synched as I take in the light and the dark and the power of the work. I let myself wander on the way back to the club and when I turn my 3rd corner I come face to face with a wall of forest undergrowth on the side of a building. Magic! When I get back the club it is totally packed and everyone is intensely engaged in Guadalupe Plata's set, which is gorgeous and amazing and involves heavy guitar and roaring melodic vocals and a washtub bass. We exchange clumsy compliments that are halfway lost in translation after their set and then we play. I can't hear my bass at all but Tweakbird are there again and they like it, so I feel pretty good. Kate's friends come to the show and we go out with them afterwards, to an Irish Pub playing American rock 'n roll filled with twentysomething Spanish hipsters. Paying for beer at the smoke filled bar is too much for me and Margs but we give Kate's friends our wristbands so they can all go to the Teenage Fanclub show later that night. Margot and I go back to the hotel and crash and Kate stays out all night getting into trouble backstage at Teenage Fanclub.

Farmacia