Non-Fiction Feature Piece for BCN Week

G4 SUMMIT

Graffiti, Guns, Globalization and Ganas

If you ask somebody to define exactly what "subculture" means, they will probably look at you askance for proffering such a banal question, then promptly fail to give you anything like a substantial and well-defined answer. If you look it up online, you will come across a lot of waffle that ties itself up in knots by relying excessively on the word "culture". You will find words like subversion, Punks, ambivalent, non-domestic, Goths, negative, and tribes; and you will be a much better man than I if, from it all, you can derive any real meaning or significance.

When it's too difficult to decipher the meanings of words, it is often easier to take solace in images. As I walk through the streets of the city, I notice colours jumping out at me and dragging my attention away from the grey. The walls of the city are screaming out, looking for answers that I'm not sure I have. The walls are talking, and I think we ought to listen.

The images on the page opposite are all brought to you by Los Martinez, a group that lives and breathes on the same streets you traverse. But the identity of the group is less important than engaging with its discourse. If you look closely, you will see that their work has real content, something you won't find in "subcultures" defined largely by fads and pouty posturing. Interacting with Los Martinez, you are moved uncomfortably from your previous position of impassive alienation. The sharp nip of recognition you feel when you look at their work, particularly their hearts, makes you an active part of a systematic and structured opposition to the dominant culture you were ineffectually loving to hate. You have become a true outsider. You have moved away from subculture and joined the ranks of a counterculture.

One hundred years ago, the city of Barcelona and its people passed through a period of great poverty. A poor population struggled to live and, in extreme cases, starved to death. The ratio of food spending against housing spending was around 5:1. People lived in times of economic hardship and misery, but for the most part they could afford to pay for the roofs over their heads. In modern day Barcelona, the situation has been completely reversed. A normal person, earning 1000€ a month, could survive spending only 200€ a month on food, but would be very hard pushed to cover the cost of owning an apartment in the city with the remaining 800€. Most people won't starve in La Millor Botiga del Mon, but if you're not rich, you had better look for another place to rest your head at night. It is in the reality of this environment that Los Martinez are attempting to offer an alternative message to the people of the city.

Los Martinez are a group of like-minded individuals who found each other by chance as they worked individually on the streets, and who then joined together to produce work in which we find a seamless fusion of art and social commentary. They are social warriors, committed to reclaiming public space as our own by turning it into a free gallery. But the artistic beauty of their message should not fool you into taking their work lightly. This collective group of creative friends is not only fighting to reclaim the city's public spaces. In the barrios where speculation and big business are displacing residents, tearing down buildings, and trying to negate the rich history of the places they wish to reinvent in their own selfish image, Los Martinez are also out on the front lines alongside real people.

In Bon Pastor, Los Martinez painted walls alongside niños gitanos del barrio, in protest of the forceful eviction of families from the "casas baratas". In Barceloneta, they worked with the vecinos del barrio in their fight against the Ayuntamiento's Plan de Ascensores, a scheme that would see elderly people and families evicted from their homes. But it is perhaps in Los Martinez's old home of Poblenou where their fight has been the most intense, and it is this place that best highlights the unrelenting determination of their struggle and their continued belief in it. Nevertheless, it is here, too, where the odds against the success of their movement can seem largest.

In Can Ricart and Poblenou, Los Martinez were part of the group of 3,500 vecinos and friends of the neighbourhood that protested against the monster that is 22@. This privately-funded, local-government-supported venture has displaced the majority of Poblenou's artistic community, as well as many families who had lived for generations in what was tradit ional ly one of Barcelona's few authentic working-class neighbourhoods. It's an ugly thing in itself, and a pattern that's becoming all too familiar, but 22@ is made even uglier because many of the companies that operate out of this new state-of-the-art business park are ones that deal directly in, or have links to, the manufacture of arms. Indra, whose president heads the committee of 22@, is the world's biggest non-US supplier of military equipment to the world's largest military machine, the Army of the United States of America.

The protests in Poblenou, like so many others, were to no avail, and the pain felt in this particular defeat has been worsened recently by the attempted validation of 22@ and its presence in the neighbourhood through the three-day Inside22@ festival, run under the artistic direction of Niu and in direct collaboration with the 22@ committee. How is it possible that Niu, one of the groups that originally fought alongside residents and other artists against 22@, are now actively encouraging the presence of their conquerors in a celebration that is such an incredibly frivolous and insensitive rewriting of history?

But wait. It is too easy to point fingers at the speculators, propagators of war, and those who are completely consumed by the capitalist ethos of "More". If we look closely at the hands we point with, we might note, uncomfortably, that they too have a red tinge. As literate people living in a powerful Western democracy, we are all complicit in the ills of the world, and in one way or another there is undoubtedly blood spilled in our name every day. Maybe Niu, in the wake of 22@'s successful establishment, decided, as so many of us do, that this is the way things work in the world and there's nothing they can do about it.

Perhaps this elephant in the corner has allowed an overriding sense of apathy to fester within all of us; an apathy and a complacency that seem to have become the most prominent and bitter cultural capital of the day. We have been tricked into thinking that we are redundant and unable to offer any resistance to the forces of the world that shape and control our shadow lives. We have accepted our defeat and fallen out of love with the unfamiliar faces that stare back at us blankly from the other side of the mirror. Politicians don't listen to us. Wars are fought despite our Saturday afternoon marches against them. Nothing we do makes a difference, so why should we care? In discussions with members of Los Martinez, I saw that even they feel the weight of capitalism's demand for conformity. Though they fight for others selflessly, seeking no personal promotion through their acts, their lifestyle choice comes with the cost of being reminded every day that they don't own a house, or have 2.5 children, or a job that they can put on a resume. That they have chosen an "unconventional" life.

From what I see, Los Martinez keep doing what they do because they care, not only about making a stand against the violation of the city in which we live, but also about us. They could just as easily be called Los Rodriguez, or Los Smith. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Yet as we walk forward into what may be new times of hope, it was a member of Los Martinez who told me that, "We can't do everything". It is true: the wars won't stop overnight. The mobile phones in our pockets will still signal violence in Africa. The speculators and the greedy politicians won't desist from trying to fuck us over at every turn just because we ask them not to. In spite of this knowledge, or maybe because of it, the core message of Los Martinez is to look a little longer at ourselves in the mirror each day.

The feeling we are meant to experience when we look at the bright colours of their art, standing out against the backdrop of grey and greed that surrounds it, is that those colours are inside us. If we want to pay anything other than lip service to change, then it must start here: at home, in ourselves. The hearts on the wall are our own. It is up to us to rediscover them. And it is then our responsibility to let them sing, write, paint, shout or cry out in any way that affirms our collective struggle to remain part of the original and only truly abiding culture: humanity.

Que seamos más despiertos. Que seamos más conscientes.
Que seamos más vivos.
Más Amor.

Non-fiction: 3-AM Magazine

embracing the bull: an interview with lydia lunch

Interview by Simon Friel.

Lydia Lunch is a name you should know. Lydia moved to New York at 16 and, with her band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, was one of the founders of the still influential, but short-lived, No Wave movement. She has collaborated with artists and performers such as Nick Cave, Sonic Youth, Henry Rollins, Omar Rodriquez-Lopez, Asia Argento, Richard Kern and Hubert Selby Junior, and today from her base in Barcelona continues to produce a vast and diverse range of work.

Her memoir Paradoxia: A Predator’s Diary chronicles her life from its conception up on through to a self-defining reawakening in her mid-thirties. It has been translated into 8 languages. Paradoxia bulldozes through emotions and sensibilities in much the same way that men’s cocks tear into Lydia throughout her numerous, anonymous encounters; ruthlessly and without remorse. Incest, satanism, rape, bestiality, cannibalism paedophilia, insanity and destitution are just some of the many themes explored, devoured and left for dead as the reader is pulled along a road of broken glass under the influence of acid while Lydia rips through the cities of New York, L.A., Amsterdam, London and New Orleans.

The writing is the most honest that I have ever read and for the same reason some of the most beautiful, shocking and poetic too. Lydia never seeks to justify and explain the things that happen or proffer empty apologies. In spite of all the blood, violence, destruction and waste that are left in her wake, it is, for me, Thurston Moore’s final line in the book’s afterword that rings most true: She can love you.

I was lucky enough to meet up with Lydia. This is a little bit like how it went;

3:AM: What is Paradoxia?

LL: Paradoxia fills a void that really exists in literature, which is an aggressive, honest, non-glamorous psychosexual voice. And I think we can find traces of that hyperreality in a lot of different male writers especially from the 50s, 60s and 70s but for female writers there’s still a vacancy. It’s just not their language, and I have a much more blunt way of expressing what I think needs to be expressed. I’m not the only one who behaves, acts, feels or has this kind of void that they look to fill with whatever means necessary until eventually they realise that only the self will suffice and goodbye garbage.

3:AM: I was just reading the first part which says none of the names have been changed, everybody is equally fucking guilty.

LL: Even though I’m not even really naming their names.

3:AM: Exactly, that was the question, because I read a couple of reviews, and every review was positive but there was a frustration that they want to hear more about the real Lydia Lunch story and the real people in it.

LL: Well, the thing is that most of these experiences are with anonymous people, so what good does it do to name their names? I mean, look, people may be waiting and they can wait until the day that I fucking die to hear of the — for me — minutia and the boring details of the rock aspect.

SF: Will we really have to wait all that time?

LL: For me that’s not the most interesting detail. What’s important is what the search was about and what it was for. I mean, believe me, anyone asks and I’ll give them the run down and the score card. Maybe I have a different take on it because from the time I was 12 years old I would always say to my parents when I had to be at rock concerts until 3 in the morning that it was for “my career”. What career would that be, young lady? Yes, Gene Simmons probably has a photo of me at 12 in his Kiss collection. So if it starts there, it’s like, you know, names, names, names… Who cares? Who cares? And for the most part, in spite of it, it’s not like there’s that many names that people would really recognise. They weren’t the most interesting sexual partners. Sorry, they’re not — boring! Just to be a gossipy groupie, the most interesting rock and roll sexual experience was Julian Cope. I didn’t even know who he was, but I have to say that dropping acid with Julian Cope was a beautiful experience.

3:AM: I suppose this leads to a much larger question, one that draws comparisons with the epilogue where it compares your work with that of Brett Easton Ellis, which is the fact that you are very anti-capitalism, anti-consumerism, so doing that would I suppose be trading on yourself as a commodity.

LL: Exactly.

3:AM: But is that not a big fucking temptation?

LL: It isn’t a big temptation. Maybe because I think, in my own mind’s eye, I’m a bigger rock star than any of those motherfuckers. I don’t even mean rock star, I don’t give a shit about rock stardom. I don’t think of myself as a star, I think of myself as a fucking planet, honey. I’m sorry, they’re just stars, I’m a planet — fuck off!

3:AM: Ok, I mean, that’s another thing, we’ve got Nick Cave doing a big concert tonight here.

LL: Yeah, at the fucking basketball arena!

3:AM: These are all people from your history, and that’s what I mean by temptation. It must sometimes be frustrating to think they are doing that and I could be doing that.

LL: But I couldn’t be doing what they do, the same way they can’t do I what I do, because I think what separates me from a lot of the people I came up with, which would be like Sonic Youth, Nick Cave and Henry Rollins, is all three of them, in so much as all three have diversified, they have the ability to take one thing, whether it was The Bad Seeds, or Sonic Youth as a four piece, whether it was The Rollins Band, and do it and do it and do it, and I would fucking die of brain damage.

3:AM: So you don’t have the patience to do this?

LL: I’m a conceptual artist; I’m not a rock band. My concept from the beginning was you find the collaborators, you do a few shows, you document it, you fucking go on. So I don’t understand how anyone has the patience, the capacity for this kind of boredom, to play the same songs over and over. My message is always the same, it is always sexual insanity and political hysteria, or sexual hysteria and political insanity, however I have to find new ways to express this.

3:AM: So it’s not so much you not having the patience, but rather other people not having the patience with you because you’re always doing different things?

LL: How can they even keep up when I don’t work inside the machinery that lets them know?

3:AM: The world can’t keep up.

LL: I don’t fucking care. I can’t care. At 17 one of the first songs I wrote was “Popularity Is So Boring”; fuck off, I still feel the same way.

3:AM: You obviously still have a lot of energy and you have been running it for 31 years, so why Barcelona? I don’t really see that same energy out here in the street.

LL: I don’t need that same energy. I left New York because it was like plugging my finger into a light socket. It was enough. I don’t need to plug into a city for energy. Here, I can just breathe, I can relax and the pace is different. As America went into fascism, I came to a place that is 30 years out of it, although there are a still a couple of danglers here and there. It’s a different energy, and part of Spain’s amnesia sees to that. If I’m focusing so much on what drives me insane, on how politically fucked things are, I need a place that doesn’t further aggravate that. I need a place that doesn’t give me more fucking cancer.

3:AM: So Barcelona is a safe haven?

LL: Curative, because most of the damage that has been done here is in the past. The architecture impacts me. I get very emotional in certain places at certain times, the history infects me. I love the hospital San Pau at the top of Avenue Gaudi: this is one of my stomping grounds. I use the architecture more for stimulation than I do the bars or the club scene.

3:AM: Ok, so what would your advice be to any young images of you who might be out there trying to make their mark today?

LL: Look, people have to be comfortable with being alone, and if you’re strong in yourself, any communication, any experiences you have are going to be far better anyway. If you understand that you may be permanently an isolated individual in a world of six billion people, be comfortable in that, then you — like I — will be able to be an endlessly wandering nomad seeking other like-minded individuals to collaborate with. So, I think you have to make whatever the time is, work for you. You have to figure out a way because there will be so many things always against you, against the individual, against someone who wants to radically create. So you have to find historical references — as I did with Hubert Selby, Henry Miller, Jean Genet, the Marquis de Sade — that can at least inspire you to create or do whatever it is that you have to do. It’s going to be the few who make a career out of complaining about everything that pisses them off, and there is only room for maybe one or two of us. I’d encourage everyone to do it, but to make a career out of it, good fucking luck! So, in other words, do as I have done: create without a budget and find a way to get it out. You’ve just got to be stubborn. I don’t care what your age is, you’ve got to be a fucking bull. Embrace the bull.

3:AM: Embrace the bull?

LL: Take the bull by the horns, cut its balls off, sew them on to the fucking base of your spine and get going. It’s that easy. What’s so hard?

3:AM: You know, I won’t have enough space in the piece for all that we’ve talked about, but that’ll definitely be going in there!

LL: That’s right, grab the bull by the horns and cut its fucking balls off. I mean, there is no other choice. I can’t find a better way of putting it.