(Klaus & Kinski) Even now that I've found that Murcia is home to the best shoegaze Iberian group, the formidable & Klaus Kinski . Not even to visit the places from Spain which runs deep in the video Nunca estas to the hill, the best song from their debut album ( You Hoguera està Ardiano ), because an anonymous commentator indicates that on youtube it is really of Elche, a town of the sea surrounding the province of Alicante, and then, if they decide not to set their video to Murcia, I why should I spend a weekend? Yet, Klaus & Kinski are fantastic, impossible to remove from the head, as well as proof that it is better to have subcultures cut with a hatchet (to them) that have not at all (by us), better to have hipster jamon y queso bori rather than with the radical chic or down size bonsai. Impastato the melancholy of My Bloody Valentine , tones of Yo La Tengo and the sweetness of Camera Obscura, and stained bolero acoustic guitars, pop heterogeneous group of Murcia-electric rather than electronic-found consistency in the voice of its singer, who appears in his deadpan irony disenchanted (starting from the initial El Cristo del Perdon ) but under the helmet, the look still and the vintage dress, trembling with romance, shyness and fear (and it touches you in Lo que no mata care ).
If you imagine a shoegaze scene Murcia takes me a lot of imagination (but still less than what I need to figure in Rome ..), is even greater effort to think Thomas Mann in Extremadura, when I listen to their relentless Muerte en Plasencia , perhaps the only song that brings them closer musically to the label Elefant , the Mecca of pop naive English, which distributes them (a publican is Jabalina ). Will Laura with us because we were in Plasencia, Jerte coming from the bridge over the river, thus having to face the same background that the great Joaquin Sorolla used almost a century ago to paint the pig market in the city , one of the great resources Extremeña (from there, still, comes perhaps the best jamon de bellota the country), and there seemed to be a highly spiritual place. The majestic building that now houses the luxurious parador a handful of baronial palaces, churches and convents, the twist of the typical arcade plaza mayor, more that stand out as vestiges of a glorious past, a Catholic and aristocratic, they seem caught up in the modern context, anonymous and poor, rather than to question the meaning of life and death, the shops of salami, cheese and oil to push 'unbridled hedonism, at least one gourmet.
yet, up the valley of Jerte from Plasencia to the west, towards the Castilla, existentialism of Klaus Kinski & returns immediately to mind. It tells sincerely the rural atmosphere of a bell ' article Travel insert that comes out on Friday with El Pais, El Viajero, who read a day before a Berenjena rellena in my second home in Madrid (the eternal Guitarrista Communist , restaurant more Castizo the city), led me to rent the car and make two hundred kilometers to the east, to see live is the effect that the fall in Extremadura, a region abandoned at the border with Portugal. And so we slept in the castle that houses the Parador de la Vera Jarandilla, reading the newspaper in the same rooms where Charles V had stopped to rest, along the carretera joining as dots in a forgotten puzzles all the villages in the valley, with chilies hanging from the balconies resting on rickety wooden columns, and walls covered dall'eternit workshops filled with canned tomatoes, jams, honey, cheese, chestnuts, paprika and black pudding patateras; through small waterfalls (they call gargantas , gorges), carpets wet leaves, stretches of cherry trees (which in the spring color of white hills, and far seems to have just snowed), visited the German cemetery of Cuacos de Yuste, hidden in a nook between the bends, where German soldiers are buried who died in two world wars on the coasts and lands in English cause of the sinking of their ship or killing of their aircraft, remember all without distinction un'asutera with dark granite cross, and as a spiritual climax, and then contemplate the serene perfection of the view that dominates the monastery of Yuste, where Charles V decided to retire in the last years of his life and especially death. If this is not a death in Plasencia, a little (way) we missing.
What then, has always struck me that the interpretation of Death in Venice (or at Plasencia, is the same) has given Alejandro Rossi in a chapter of his Manual of distraìdo . He writes that when the Mexican philosopher Gustav von Aschenbach, collapsed-after-supper in his chair on the terrace, looking at the horrible, blatant, grotesque spectacle offered by the street musicians came unexpectedly in the hotel, decided not to stand , not to leave, because they see adverts in a universe messy and ambiguous. Contemplates them, and realize that Venice, wonderful and putrid, are actually those actors beggars, those clowns, which in turn is the "desire", the other bank, denied the reality (namely, his love for the young Tadzio). According to Smith, when Aschenbach asks the player if Venice is now plagued, what if they want to know is symbolic of his desire-are sick you està pregunta es necesaria para satisfacerse acept the Destruction, maquillarse dear, a de convertirse en ellos. The answer is ambiguous, however, Aschenbach captures the sense and when he decides, as in a dream, to enter that area you dye your hair and turns her face was transformed into a fictional character. To see how anything the matter in the end, after the cathartic laughter with guests, the musicians take off their masks and "expose" the farce, the comedy that had personified, why Aschenbach finally receives the gaze of Tadzio and it remains to only on the terrace, and this is the only thing that counts for him.
Death, or at least his image, to be a recurring thought among hispter Murcian (as was the bible for hipster in Glasgow, according to Stuart Murdoch), if also the legendary Lydia Damunt , compatriot Klaus & Kinski and most Western character of the English indie scene can not fail to wear their shoes when interpreting his songs chapped. In addition to bringing the tuba on his head, neck harmonica, guitar in hand, pandereta ankle, also the lead singer of Hello Cuca often sports a carnival costume skeleton, from which emerge only lost his eyes and his messy fringe, as in Bergman (chess game included) video Echo begin to run, shot in the incredible scenery of the desert that lies between Murcia and Almeria, so dusty, desolate and full of agave as to echo the words of Sr. Chinarro ("no acudieron Buitres, pues también habìan muertos"). Perhaps then it is no coincidence that death is always linked to a geographic south as well as metaphysical, and now that I think if all those years ago I did not end in Murcia, it is only because-obviously-for me it was not yet time to die. The day that I feel ready, the day when I can no longer bear (to put it in the words of visionary Alfred Kubin) Anti-expressing the forces of attraction and repulsion, the poles of the earth with their currents, the changing of the seasons, day and night, the white and black, that "hell is that that this double game is stretched out heard us, "I'll know where to go, rent a car, put the disk & Klaus Kinski, and without air conditioning, will head south towards Murcia, and I will not be (the) only.
