Give 'Em What They Want

Yesterday Raf and I decided to do what the girls would like most, so we took taxis (our family is too big for just one, so we have to split up and take two) to the top of Montjuic/Miramar Gardens to ride the "cable car" that suspends over the city and down to the port. Raf is a trooper - he doesn't like this stuff, but took one for the team.

Next, we took a hop on/hop off double-decker bus tour of the city... which the kids tolerated for a few minutes, then Raf took them back to the hotel in a taxi and I stayed on for another 20 minutes. Later as the afternoon cooled a little, we all rode on the "blue" route to see some famous Gaudi sites, kind of a Modernista drive-by. I would have liked to have spent much more time at each of Gaudi's buildings - La Pedrera is a fantasy city block of whipped-cream-capped towers and Casa Batllo was like a Dr. Seuss illustration come to life. Nothing prepared me for the scale of Sagrada Familia, the church that Gaudi designed but knew he wouldn't live to see finished. It is an ongoing construction and each dollar donated will help finish it -- though even Gaudi imagined that it would take generations to complete. The upstairs of the double-decker bus ride was worthwhile because it enabled us to crane our necks high enough to see the colorful ceramic tiles on the turrets and study Gaudi's mastery of the three dimensions.

But it was clear that we couldn't ride the bus for very long after the church - the kids were getting restless. We taxi-ed back to Placa de Catalunya and shopped at H&M, where the girls bought "souvenirs" (that I might actually find back in Woodland Hill, but whatever, right?). Serena and Marlowe bought matching outfits (a phenomenon we've seen on several non-twin siblings throughout Europe this summer). We were feeling confident, so we even went so far as to talk the kids into a cute but pricey & touristy cafe on a 2nd floor terrace, where the service was too slow and the menu items too weird for the kids... and we eventually just stood up and left. Serena talked us into trying a place down the street that said "pizzeria"... all of us hemmed and hawed, but they had a free table so we went for it.

And it was the best meal the kids have eaten in over a week! Emme ate two platefuls of spaghetti bolognese and two platefuls of paella; Serena barely looked up from her plate of spaghetti long enough to drink a cup of water; and Marlowe was using her fingers to shove buttery pasta into her mouth. It was like they hadn't eaten for ages and the mood definitely shifted.

So the phrase must be changed: if the kids are happy, everybody's happy!

My Kid and Salvador Have a Lot in Common

Marlowe insisted on putting this hard-boiled egg into her silver purse before we left San Sebastian for the Bilbao Aeroporto. She doesn't like hard-boiled eggs, so the very fact that she had one in her purse, next to the play Euro money set we'd bought for her in Biarritz and the stuffed animals she'd brought, was troubling. Why? I wondered. Why an egg, for God's sake?

Perhaps the odder discovery was this enormous egg at the entrance to a massive exhibition of Salvador Dali's work, housed at the Artist's Circle in Barcelona, off Avenida Portal de l'Angel. I'm guessing that people throughout dear Salvador's life were like me, wondering Why? Why an egg? Why bent clocks? Why, on God's green earth, do you wax your dang mustache, Sal?

I'd been dying to see a museum on this trip, even though I know it's not a super-duper museum-heavy excursion. With kids, the expectations cannot be that you'll get to all the wonders of the world -- I'll do a post on toting the kids around Barcelona, too, to show what we actually have done -- but I was aching to see some of this Spanish art. It is so modern and fresh, despite the fact that it's old. I am also struck by how different it is from the art I've seen in Florence and in Paris - it's irreverent and sensual and erotic in nature, but witty and funny and human.

So the very fact that a Dali exhibition was literally down the avenida from our hotel kept nipping at my heels. I asked Raf if we should take the girls, to expose them to the fantastic Senor Dali, but he insisted that I go alone, save the cost of three wasted admissions and enjoy wandering alone among his legacy, so I did.

For 8 Euros, it was a bargain - a warren of cave-like rooms, each curated thoughtfully to give breadth and depth to Dali's many artistic whims and periods. One room showed off his fascination with sparse drawings of mythology, another was dedicated to his packaging and product design, another was strictly nudes. I followed two small arrows on the floor past a small bronze sculpture and through heavy red velvet drapes -- it was difficult to even find the opening -- into a womb-like room filled with small bronze sculptures with biblical symbology, each illuminated by its own spotlight. I was alone in there, which was both creepy and exhilarating. To see the work of a master artist up close like that was breath-taking.

And the exhibit went on like that. I found myself utterly drawn to the small-scale version of a sculpture that Dali had created for the 1954 Fallas de San Joseph in Valencia; by "small," I mean that it took up a small room, but was the model for a large-scale installation piece for a festival in Valencia where, once a year, artists would create a piece of art to show and then blow up with fireworks, letting it burn while the crowd celebrates. It is the ultimate statement of "art for art's sake." (Although, since Dali kept the mini version, perhaps he knew it would be valuable, no?) The black and white photos lining the walls around the model are incredible in and of themselves, with Dali directing a team of metal workers and sculptors in a warehouse, then assembling the model at Fallas, then the darkening sky filling with sparks from fireworks, then the entire crazy thing going up in a blaze of smoke and flames.

Another thing I liked about the exhibit were the simple photos of Dali and his love, Gala, at their home with friends, Dali in a bathrobe or naked while painting, Dali floating in the sea water near his home in Figueres, Dali in his coffin during the magnificent bit of performance art that was his funeral. I read that Dali not only painted and sketched, but sculpted, directed films, wrote a novel... A true Renaissance man.

So okay, maybe I don't *get* the egg, but I like it. And that's "art," isn't it? You don't know what it is -- and you don't have to -- but you like it.