The Citizen

When I found out a friend of mine from Argentina who’d been living here for seven years was about to be awarded  Spanish Citizenship, I decided to tag along and experience the big day with him and give him a keepsake to show family and friends around the world just what he’d accomplished.  And here it is. I now present to you: “The Citizen”…

Corretger5

I’ve recently started filming the creative and intellectual goings-on in a local exhibition space called Corretger5 in the “El Born” neighborhood of Barcelona (where Chauncey and I also live). There, a group of young enthusiastic designers, artists and architects come together to share their passions and beliefs. Below are two magical evenings at Corretger5, a creative Chinese New Year party and a night of talks with an exhibition of photos about the Palestine conflict.

The Only American in the Race

Ryan Breymaier, the only American in the race

Barcelona World Race 2010 – 2011

article by Chauncey Zalkin
video by Peter Crosby

Most days along the Barcelona port, African immigrants unravel their draw-string blankets full of counterfeit goods as swarms of tourists line up for the one restaurant with a front row seat to the harbor and its boats belonging to Barcelona’s wealthy and the international jetset touring the Mediterranean.

But on a morning walk the day before New Years Eve, my husband and I stumbled upon, first a photo exhibit of jaw-dropping photographs, some of the most remarkable points in the ocean around the world, then further on kids lined up with their parents to enter a simulated wind tunnel, extreme conditions out at sea, and finally a portable pool with toy sailboats zipping around under the gathering clouds. In the distance, a building made of inflated PVC and glass rose like an flame-hued organism breathing life into the dramatic skies of the final days of 2010.

As we followed the march of the curious down the pier at the end, instead of finding the prim white and blue sailboats that normally dot the southern view down to Barceloneta, we found slick state of the art sailing machines. These truly impressive vessels were covered in skins that looked more like the digital kind in video games than the vinyl film wrapped around racing cars (you just don’t expect sailboats dressed up in such clothing). Each boat was different from the next and outfitted for two-person crews, heralded by banners brandishing their pictures, men and women that would soon take the helm and lead these boats on a ninety-day race around the world. Some had big spindly skipper wheels light years different from the ships ahoy style wooden spokes you find on the walls of sailor-themed restaurants. Others had electric tills that looked like they might lead boats through galaxies rather than past continents.

We looked around and deliberated who to talk to. Ropes separated onlookers from last minute preparations on board – checks on vital equipment, course-plotting, weather mapping, and below deck, the bobbing heads in the water belonging to scuba divers scouting the perimeters of the boats for flaws. Sailors hailed from around Europe as well as the UK and even New Zealand. There was only one boat manned by an American. Only one? That piqued my curiousity and we made a beeline for the man that matched the picture on the side of the boat.

Ryan Breymaier sat high up in the mast of the black and white Neutrogena boat, one hand in a pot as he pulls up thumbfulls of wax to rub into the rope. We asked if we could get on board and talk to him and explore the galley. After making our way through the criss-crossing ropes on the back of the boat, we kneeled down and began our interview. He was utterly relaxed. He’d done 30,000 miles on the boat, and had been living on it for a month or more leading up to that day. We were essentially sitting in the man’s living room. He gave us some great insight on his being the sole representative of the U.S. ‘America doesn’t really go for individualist pursuits. The U.S. warms more to team sports, everyone sharing in the glory. Racing around buoys to a glorious finish in a group is more our thing (obviously referring to the America Cup which is indeed an ostentatious affair.)’ I never gave much thought to world racing but I got this heart-thumping feeling like I was talking to a superhero which is more than a little silly but then it struck me; what Ryan is doing is more reminiscent of old-fashioned heroics. Sure he’s connected 24/7 by broadband to the wider world and there are emergency measures in place to help in a worst case scenario but the reality is there is no one around for miles, no boat to save these two if the forces of nature decide to throw a wrench in their plan. At the end of the day, it’s just two men and a boat. And the boat, as slick as it is, is no cruise ship.

The outside deck is a lean and nimble machine, yes, but the galley is a far cry from Larry Ellison’s latest yacht. It’s more like an unfinished casing no different from the hollow trunk size storage of a day boat. The pearl of this oyster is a modest sized computer screen with smaller screens on either side. The place where the two sailors bed down for the night, most likely in shifts, are cubbyholes with taut mesh platforms better suited for storage than human slumber. During our interview Ryan remarked on the professional nature of their pursuit. A funny word, professional, for an event with such a strong human element, also one in such a raw unfettered dance with nature, but you have to maintain a cool demeanor and be able to take any unforeseen event in stride, keeping your emotions in check as two people squeezed tightly into a 60 ft (18.28 m) sliver of space in the middle of the ocean. The wind, the caprice of the sea, the temperature, are not the only forces to contend with. You also have the solitude and the bare bones essence of the setting – but Ryan is positively unruffled by any of this. He looks forward to the wind and the sun, the challenge, and the experience. As we’re leaving, and now bombarded by new people coming on board, he stepped away from the fray and tapped us, hey you know you can follow us online, grab a boat and race along with us and I’m brought back to the realization that the heart of this is the adventure. We’re enchanted by the experience and the next day, before the race begins, Peter comes back to shoot the boats taking their places at the starting point in the Mediterranean not far from the statue of the quintessential explorer, Christopher Columbus, pointing out to sea. You can see Peter’s impressionistic, hauntingly beautiful and poignant video below.

-Chauncey Zalkin

Peter Crosby, photographer, videographer, location scout’s musical video experience of the BWR 2011….

You could even say it glows ~ Happy New Year ~

Sometimes you just let your leg fall asleep. You feel one leg cutting off circulation from the other (or in my case, my foot digging neatly into the soft padding of my opposite thigh) and though you feel the numbness forming, you are engrossed or reposed and you simply don’t move the limb. This is me new years day. I woke up at 2pm and made us both eggs with manchego, baked beans, bitter greens, chorizo and toast and served it with mimosas made from Pascual orange juice “exprimidas” – that means squeezed – and cava from the Pakistani-owned deli just up the narrow damp street that runs perpendicular from our door.

We’ve decided we’ll let the Christmas lights twinkle on our tree for one more day.  After that, we’ll unravel everything and give that corner back its free space and get on with the rest of our year. Though I’ll miss the play of light coming from the corner of our living room, I really didn’t feel Christmas all that deeply this year.  A bit like how I didn’t feel my leg until I shook the numbness loose and walked over to the bed to continue to write, resting my neck (which has been suffering from a pinched nerve for two days now). Peter kept saying ‘c’mon, it’s Christmas’ and I went along enjoying myself immensely for the shopping in Santa Caterina market that it required. We bought a half of a turkey. They were so big that half was the only solution. We simulated a British Christmas meal with BBC radio and all the acoutrement I described in the last post and we got loopy on Jameson’s while playing dominoes which created a nice atmosphere, but I didn’t feel the noel.

It’s not that I’m a scrooge  — and Christmas doesn’t depress me like it did when I was single and didn’t have this burgeoning family of my own — it’s just that while the rest of the world was caught in a flurry of white that wouldn’t let them forget the season, we’ve been in a damp southern European city where the cultural cues, the extensive nativity scene decorations, the blocks of turron candy sold at every shop, the squatting elvin figurines ‘pooing’ presents – an actual custom in Catalonia – a bit like our Santa Claus if he were the scatological sort – are not mine and don’t trigger the Christmas reflex, sad or happy. It just isn’t Christmas without the familiar store sales, marketing gimmicks, Saks windows, airport congestion or train travel like last year when we went to Madrid.

Christmas is for kids, besides. The years before this we channeled our childlike instincts (which are not so far from the surface) and we did the same this year but with feeble results. We spent most of it in stillness, wondering about tomorrow and feeling the waves of inbetweeness that still wash over us. In that frame of mind, we watched stories from his culture and mine – the British  animated cartoon, The Snowman with the exquisite song ‘walking in the air’ a boy’s fantasy of flying while his dull inured parents sleep through til Christmas dawn – and cruel American tales of an ostracized Rudolph and a lonely and alienated mountain man, the Grinch.

Yesterday I went to a reflexologist for my neck pain. She folded her hands in front of her after the Chakra stone therapy she threw in proved fruitless. It was a jumbled up misfiring of signals that made my stomach tighten. True relaxation just wasn’t possible. You are a good person, she told me to start, but you are not happy inside.  Your liver, your kidneys, your intestines, she started to write using Google Translate to list out the organs that were not happy inside. She sent me to an herbolist for a tea to drink mornings to flush out my kidneys. I looked inside the bag which contained the usual dried herbs and leaves but also tufts of something that looks like the hair I sweep up from Niji’s coat thrice weekly. It’s chilling in the refrigerator now. I’m going to go with this. I’m going to imagine it to be a cure for listlessness and indecision. I know a million writers work way off the grid to get their book published but the whole publishing world I know so little about seems no more than a muffle in its distance. I have to face the idea that to lose my ego completely I have to stop pretending I like big corporate jobs that support big corporate salaries. I have to unwrap one leg from around the other and let the feeling flow back in. And if I’m succesful in that, I can say it will be a happy new year indeed.

Happy New Year.

-Chauncey Zalkin

(Here is Walking in the Air – Sony will make you go to Youtube to watch it but it’s worth the extra click)

New York City Transit