ghostly burgos

Burgos is all sumptuous cathedral soaring into the frosty stratosphere...
Catedral de Burgos glories in the Assumption of the Virgin Mary with the full gothic grandeur of her french precursors... the openwork tracery of her stone spires, stained-glass windows and the lacy star vault are pierced with pure heavenly light...
El Cid rests with his wife Dona Jimena beneath a simple marble tombstone within the cathedral...
I floated alone through cavernous chapels adorned with ostentatious ornamentation of such unearthly splendour, in the golden haze of lit candles, flames flickering to the breath of mellifluous angels...

the square outside was deserted save for a lone pilgrim who trudged slowly past us, his long journey etched onto his grimy face...

the streets were mostly empty and a cold wind swirled through the meticulously groomed topiary shrubs...

statues of kings and saints are rigidified apparitions rising above a silent city dusted by a fine efflorescence of snow...

and we leave a most frigid spanish bourg where the few people we met were most gracious, the architecture and public spaces all immaculately maintained, and the feast that warmed us up again in a restaurant bursting with so much lively energy and hearty diners that it more than made up for the spectral chilliness outside in the wintry mists...

madrid maravilla

Madrid lives on sweet jamon in all its salty incarnations...

denso, suave el aire orea tantas callejas,

plazuelas, cuya alma es la flor del naranjo.

she reveres her guitar gods, strumming to her lifeblood...

resuenan cerca, lejos, clarines masculinos

aqui, alli la flauta y oboe femeninos.

she brings her glory Art back to the Prado after the carnage...

magica por el cielo la luna fulge, llena

luna de parasceve. azahar, luna, musica,

she dances her full passion on a holy sunday afternoon...

entrelazados, banan la ciudad toda. y breve

tu mente la contiene en si, como una mano
 
she dreams her soft childhood through an antique store window...

amorosa. nostalgias? no. lo que asi recreas

es el tiempo sin tiempo del nino, los instintos

she touches the warm cracked tiles of her ancestral land...

aprendiendo la vida dichosamente, como

la planta nueva aprende en suelo amigo. eco

and she wonders at the pendent world through the silvery falling stars...

que, a la doble distancia, generoso hoy te vuelve,

en leyenda, a tu origen. et in Arcadia ego.

[verses in spanish are from "Full Moon During Holy Week" by Luis CERNUDA, 1902-1963]

palacio longoria

as alligator pilasters cling on to the back entablature of this singular modernista specimen in Madrid,

other parts of the façade are ornamented with creamy swirls of sculptural adornment

and accentuated with intricate metalwork...

not quite as fantastical nor as muscularly portentous as Gaudi's creations, but more luscious wedding cake art nouveau - an all-out visual ambrosia to a fault...

Palacio Longoria

Calle de Fernando VI

Madrid 

casa de blas

this is a house inspired by a book of Luis Cernuda poems...

by an architect who is sublimely poetic with his play of light...

this is a house built for a professor of spanish literature...

for listening to the music of silence, the music of the soul...

I have carried an article about this house for years now, taking it with me to France, to Spain - where the house was built outside of Madrid for Francisco de Blas, the receptive literature professor...

The architect, Alberto Campo Baeza, is based in Madrid, and I was tempted to visit his firm to find out more about his work...but shyness overcame me...

Like the Casa Malaparte, it is another idiosyncratic house that I have fallen in love with, another isolated structure conceived on another impossible site with an elongated plinth or "cave" housing the living areas and the "stage" above on which to absorb the all-encompassing views, to while away time following the sun's daily path and of course, to be lulled by the musicality of the landscape - the lightness and openness of the glass pavilion an ethereal counterpoint to the solidness and practicality of the concrete box below...

This purist elegance of a basic geometric form pushing up from the arid mount, its lustrous glass wings lifting to the widening sky - a most elemental shelter and a most resonant temple for well-read, well-tuned earthy beings...

"La Quimera susurra hacia la luna

Y tan dulce es su voz que a la desolacion alivia."*

[line from "Desolacion de la Quimera" by Luis Cernuda]

*["The Chimera murmurs at the moon

And its voice is so sweet it eases its desolation."] 

Casa de Blas

oil and acrylic on canvas;

55 x 70 cm

l'arquitectura madrilena

a very small and haphazard selection of edifices snapped around Madrid, not including any of the many grand monumental buildings that frequently overwhelm our visual field...

basic live-work vernacular...

Escher-inspired tile motif...

the backside of the Palacio Longoria...

under renovations in the Chueca district...

demolished and awaiting something new...

Caixa Forum's oxidized lacy blocks...

 and the hot pink bedsheet spices up life in work-a-day Madrid...
[a prosaic view from the top of the Jean Nouvel expansion of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia]

madrid elemental

MADRID razed us ever so quixotically with consistently warm and kind people, the hyper-chic and comfort factor of our hotel in an old renovated textile warehouse in the garment district, the Plaça Major almost to ourselves but for some policia on horseback letting their horses scratch their hind quarters on the base of a statue, the addictive tapas from the renewed, glassed-in and upscale Mercado San Miguel, the magnificent Goyas at the Prado [the "elephants" in Espana for me!], the one euro ham bocadillo from the Museo de Jamon [not a real museum but the ham "hang-out", or rather "hanging-down", spot!], the levitating view from the top of Jean Nouvel's extension at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sophia, Picasso's massively devouring "Guernica", a consecrated REAL MADRID game in HD, the antiquated patisseria with barely moving nonagenarian owner in the workaday Chueca district, reviving in the winter sunshine at the tranquil Parque de el Retiro, the maddeningly expansive junk web that is the El Rastro flea market on a Sunday morning, and always, the ripe Spanish moon above a dark narrow street where Cervantes had lived, written and died...

cielo madrileno

the skies of Madrid were an exuberant blue, an atmospheric juvenescence, an azure foreshining of the elation to come...la furia roja has recently returned home triumphant and adored - a whole nation united in a golden moment of blissful elevation - and the fleet-footed spanish boys keep on flashing their victory smiles...

above the Palacio Real...

above the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia...

above TIO PEPE in the Plaza Puerta del Sol...

above the Parque del Buen Retiro...

donostia/san sebastian

A winter twilight on the Playa de la Concha in Donostia, the Basque name for San Sebastian, a toss of the wave away from the French coast...[driving through Bayonne and Biarritz in the Pays Basque a few years ago, we pique-niqued royally high up on a cliff while watching the Atlantic surf crashed over brave rubberized men perched precariously on long slippery boards!]
This here in Spanish Basque country is also a well-fed and pampered town, the elderly leisured class always immaculately groomed and highly polished and full of sea air vigor...while the young surfers rock the waves on another beach and the seasoned fishermen disappear into the horizon...

We had our fill of hardy pintxos from some of the many tabernas in the old town where we stayed and stocked up on Basque yogur [the best!] and big bars of turron de chocolate...

We walked the port and beaches and narrow streets until dark and the breezes blowing in from the Golfo de Vizcaya had stiffened a few degrees chillier - turning us inland again, heading south towards the warmer heart of Espana...

 

pamplona/iruna

Pamplona...Iruna...basking in the kingdom of Navarre...
where the sun also rises, but did not show itself to us...
where the drizzle-drenched streets narrow through tall tight buildings in the casco viejo [old city]...
where we [disappointedly] did not run into any rampaging bulls...
where Hemingway still stands guard in front of the third largest bull-ring in the world...
where even the most foolhardy pilgrims sat this weekend out to indulge in more comfort pintxos [Basque tapas]...
where we set foot on the slippery bridge of the departure point for the spanish leg of the El Camino de Santiago, only to wander as far as the cavernous and populous Café Iruna where we were no longer the loneliest and hungriest people in a softly raining Spain...