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1 + 1/2 year living in dublin, going to gigs, checking bands, getting bored and giving up: i find very cool bands, but not what i want.

2 months ago i learnt about the hot sprockets, check their tracks in myspace: first feeling is that they are not really my style, but i went to my first sprocket’s gig and wow!

… i mean, wowwww!

radio city, may 9th i think, saturday late evening.

these guys were smoking in the garden yard, they looked so good… i noticed them, i could feel a very cool vibration, and i didn’t know they were the hot. the feeling was so great that i was about to take out my camera and ask them if i could take some pics of them. i didn’t know that i was already within, enchanted, sweetly bitten by the sprockets. big surprise when i saw them on stage and realized.

i have never seen such a tight band. they are brothers, they enjoy so much together that they really build something, sort of sorcerers who love to share their best spirit with the people. they get us in their mood, warm, rock, happy, fresh.

frankie is the best harmonica i’ve listened so far… he’s got the soul of black mississippi and the sweetest eyes ever.

age stands great at the back of the stage with the drums, he’s perfect, he’s austere, he’s hidden but he’s there.

tim & joey are so great: tim looking as a true canalla and joey as a line over the wind, both riding their guitars to the wild, to the hot.

i have no words for sober. I just have images…

( … )

i keep checking for bands, looking for new sounds & new feelings and keep on coming back to them. I don’t like to stop when i find what i want, but it seems that i’ve found pure satisfaction!

check their agenda and make sure you don’t miss their next gig.

The Hot Sprockets - Sonny Boy Blues on MUZU.

first time i saw this guys live was in the twisted pepper, abbey st, dublin. the room upstairs is tiny, just the size for a small & funny semi-private party.

they were listening hot sprockets beside me (hot were second band), and i did not know they were the merchants. i told them, aren’t the hot sprockets the best band in dublin? they agreed! then i saw them plugging after the hot and realized who they were. fair play to them!

hassle merchants’ live is more than pure rock, entering his world is quite an experience. i wish i could understand the lyrics, who cares about words anymore…

i give you hassle merchants

i haven’t been posting for a long time because i had no internet connection, a chronicle bronchitis and a some other issue worth to write about some day.

hope to be updating blog again, and not with writings but with pics: i’m shooting good irish rock bands in dublin, and want to write about them because they are great.

the pics below are already between my classics, my favourites: taken may 9th @ radio city, a great discovery, the hot sprockets

will post a text dedicated to these 5 guys extremely sweet & good & rock. hope you enjoy them as much as i do.

i fell in love with percy bysshe shelley so badly that i spent several months in bed, from november to april.

it was a love very difficult to live for several reasons. the main one, he was my grand mother lover’s and i knew it and it didn’t matter to me… but it did matter to her. when she knew, she threw to me 66 demons to drive me crazy. and she almost succeed… but that would be another story to tell.

he did not abandon me. he stayed with me. he loved me.

he eventually abandon me. he eventually left and loved someone else. it has taken me ages to accept it. now i just miss him. he is in me so much that sometimes i feel him as if he was alive and beside me, living with me my strange life. it’s the intense, he is in the wind when it is the wildest, he is the headiest wine, and he is stuck in my body as if it had taken possession of it for ever.

he was the most demanding lover, it is written somewhere else. i remember myself in a deep state of confused darkness reading his sonnets, walking through the corridors of our house with a candle, reading his sonnets nude, barefoot, with a candle in one hand and his book in the other. i remember the way he would lie down with me, giving me his body, embracing me as if he wanted to melt the flesh together. i remember him drinking the spirit of me. we were desire.

i received one day a letter telling me that he had passed away. i stole a horse and rode to the beach. mary was there, acting perfectly her role. i stood over the hill while he was incinerated. the wind carried some of his ashes to me, some burnt papers with his poems handwritten by him flied in the hands of the wind, and some would gently land in the ground i was stood.

yes, i do expect him to come back to me. it would not be the first time a writer sometimes writes to get her/his lover back. i am not the only woman who looks at the eyes of every man wanting to find her lover. and what i find would be another stories to tell.

i haven’t written yet about my uncle jules. he was fantastic… a party with cousin gargoyle and uncle jules could end in never imagined situations. it was gas.

i don’t know how my family managed to look after me one after the other. i see them gathered in the ballroom, sat everywhere, with the red velvet little bag in which there were marble balls with their names. i see myself putting my hand into the bag, touching the balls, and sometimes trying to choose the one i wanted… i would pick sherezade, julio, oscar, mary, emily, don juan, clara… i would always jump madly if i read jules.

he liked going to china. i might know why. china is one of the countries in which you can see all ages in one age. he enjoyed calling china as the land of the shapes.

we went once to a very new town. well, it was not a town… it was a space, it had no known shape. we used to visit spaces with new shapes in which you could not use any language because there were no words for that life. he loved it, finding the new. he used to say that too many people in this world are too fond of living between known life. look at history, he said, a man can conquer gods’ golden secrets and it will take ages to change people’s minds. it’s so funny, so curious, he added… little one, you will be so happy if you succeed forgetting yourself in your travels to the unknown…

… and i try hard… not trying to travel the unknown, and not in the task of forgetting myself, but being happy at the very stage.

grand granddad and i used to have long walks through streets and paths of cities, towns, villages, ports… those memories are very precious to me.

we would have breaks in the local places, he would enjoy the wine and conversations with the people around and i would have soup and stories, great simple stories.

one evening, in a little bar beside a port, he pointed to someone. look at that man, he whispered to me, can you see anything extraordinary in him?

i looked at him, just a man having his wine standing at the counter having some laughs… i could also say that he liked observing women, and women liked him, and any men was bothered by it. he was respected in a quiet way. sorry about my english, i feel i have no words and grammatical knowledge to write this.

homer went on, pointing me facts, signals, symbols… and for a moment i thought i knew… and what could not be possible was possible: it was him, zeus, having some wine, chatting with the old sailors. my grand grand papa smiled looking at my eyes in surprised. you see?, and he slightly pointed at the name of the bar, outside the door. olympia.

when i remember that, i realize how little i remember of what i learnt with the family. i knew greek and some other ancient and modern languages, i knew more that what i know now. how could i forgot all those treasures? is it that i know just what i need to know right now? in a sense, that’s positive. in fact, that’s a decision i took some years ago: just to know what i need to know in every right now, in a neverlasting sequence of “right now”. it’s quite amazing to succeed in something apparently so simple.

… but let’s go back to that place, olympia, the taste of the warm soup, the colour of the wine, the sounds of a port beside the mediterranean sea. i am so fond of it. i miss it somehow, although i always try to enjoy myself wherever i am. always, the nature of every place, its spirit.

i feel certain sadness because that knowledge that came from the greeks seems to dissappear in me as a wandering fog.

sometimes i wonder if it might be because mankind is forgetting things too.

in this way of mine of sharing genealogy, i must write that i am not really fond of speculative writing. i don’t really know how to define speculative writing, i mean, what i don’t like to do when i work.

i can say that papa Julio was always about to be speculative, but in most of his works he is not. on the contrary, and from my point of view, granddad Jorge gave himself to certain speculation.

what exactly is that? i don’t know if i can get closer.

my french favourite writers influenced me for not being speculative. and yet, I think I do it sometimes, inevitable, in spite of my will.

i try to stop when i am following the path of speculation, but it is very difficult. and more when my reason seems unable to define what I mean by that. i just can trust my intuition.

i suppose it might be to know the balance between what it is fiction and what can be considered as a reality. it would also be like knowing where to stop the rhizome.

within the space of genealogy, i can write that i am almost sure that virginia woolf was my mother, but I would not write that I discovered at some stage that marguerite duras could be my true mother. why? it would mean that I did not understand properly duras’ work. The way virginia worked allows me to be able to insert her as one of my closest relatives. marguerite chose another way of writing. I really live that way of writing… but i can’t use her name in the same way i use virginia’s. my french writers are masters for me, but not relatives. If I want to place them in genealogy, I must create another root for them, a rhizome just for them. that would make another book.

that’s one of the clues of this work: a decision I took years ago about my writings. I write about what I want to last. I would not write about what I don’t like, as I’ve written somewhere. to name the people that i don’t like is to give them space in my world, time and energy i believe they do not deserve. i am quite sure of what i want to link with me, what to be linked with.

then genealogy becomes a challenge because all the artists that are very important to me not only have to be named, but also placed in their place to perform this work in which fiction and reality have an almost unknown frontier.

i met 2 of my lovers in 1 of my recurrent dreams, and it was as real as in what we call real life.

to write about this story i would need to point the fact that any of my relatives was a film maker. and that’s what i really have always wanted to be, a film maker. writers and film makers are different, their tools are different, and so their workspace.

i suppose that a writer can become a film maker. what i did was what i could at that moment: just writing the script.

i could be influenced by one of my cousins’ friend. it was the gargoyle’s birthday, and we were invited to a fabulous party in paris. my cousin the gargoyle was a very friendly being, and he would have the most amazing creatures for friends. in that family meeting, the gargoyle had a surprise for all of us. we were to know the golem. gustav meyrink was among the guests, and the golem was introduced by one of his assistants in a very mysterious way. i felt that it was not the first time i met that legend.

days later, this dream began. i was in the castle’s library in a state of insomnia, visualizing clearly the born of 2 men in a top circular room without windows or doors lost in the city of prague. i lived my love story with both of them through my dreams. and i eventually wrote it as a script for a movie.

later on, i discovered some movies that showed some similarities with what i wrote. but just similarities, i must say; not anything with the same nature as my story.

i think that the same fact has happened several times: i’ve been writing about a certain subject and found in the media the same story but from a different point of view.

it is as if there was somewhere a dreams archive in where we would get our ideas. i don’t think that anyone can describe that place in the same way, it depends on our personality, or fate, or desire…

that’s one of the reasons i am more interested about the process of writing or creating than the stories or works themselves.

in “lucifer’s dream”, i created 2 man, or to be true to the story, the 2 man used me to be created. as i said, i was in the castle’s library, so they could use its force to be: they would keep me in that terrible state of insomnia in order to meet me. the first one was the bastard, i still see him clearly walking the streets with his fur coat. the second one was his opposite, a quite and humble man. i woke them, or they woke me, or we woke altogether. i wrote them, or we wrote us, and when our story was finished, they disappeared. i suppose i must be glad they did not make me disappear with them !

from time to time i visit this dreams archive. it could also be said that it visits us.

when i was a little girl, i use to do strange things. i still haven’t got the answers of some few, but i can tell about some others.

i would like to write about this with care. there is not pride in it. it is almost as having a sharp knife between my fingers. i am aware of some consequences.

how did i learn to do those acts, i don’t know. i would carry them on as an expertise, a hidden knowledge moving me blindly. i can remember the paths i followed doing some, but there are 2 or 3 that are still a mystery to me.

during my teenage years i tried to become a common person, and it was a disaster. there was an extraordinary substance at my fingertips, and i could not get rid of it. now that i have certain ability of making fun of myself, i can smile remembering me at that age.

so little by little, i tried to know about me when i became a young woman. then i faced my memories. i opened the box and discovered my needles, my spells handwritten in paper, the drawings, notebooks with my dreams… and some other objects. i even had prints of both of my palm’s hands, made with a special glue, and organize by date. i wanted to have them to observe the changes of my life. i destroyed them, and nowadays i would not allow anyone to look at these laberynths of broken lines.

for a while, i was enchanted by the cards. it was almost accidental, it began because i learnt how to gamble at grandad louis’ club. i would play poker in any club in any town late until night, getting a joy, drunk at that stage, shuffling the deck after everybody had left the table.

it was kind of the same dark smoky atmosphere of rooms in new orleans, london, paris, rome, praga, in which i ended with some of my relatives. as far as i can tell, i was introduced to madame blavatsky, count cagliostro, master gurdjieff, monsieur lalique… i believe that i was once in the very presence of rasputin.  one of papa’s best friends, the great houdini, would always offer good entertainment. and my dear giacomo managed to assist to most of the meetings, any time, everywhere… the shadows, the shadow…

i took advantage of my readings using different means until i foresaw for the first time what in the western world is called a tragedy.

why i decided not to play in the future’s board? there were several reason. it might just be said that because i’ve developed an ancient eastern attitude with certain subjects. and in spite of that attitude, there still is the uncommon substance in my fingertips messing around.

somehow, now i just let life step for me.

my present circumstances are so difficult that i’ve wondered if it would be more interesting to write plainly about my life.

i am very suspicious, i must confess, about personal circumstances… specially since i read that paul celan used his time in the concentration camp to translate shakespeare to russian. it seems that dante wandered through the italian states with the divine comedy paper rolls running away from a death’s sentence.

i must confess that if i am fond of knowing the artist’s personal circumstances is to observe how human imagination spreads all over the place, taking whatever it has to develop the idea… for instances, how orson welles dealt with the movie industry to keep true to his visions… it is fascinating to see that the human creative gift goes on like a blind being through the flames…

as juan goytisolo says in godard’s notre musique, a force of creativity must keep on to balance the force of destruction… and i am not naive about the nature of art: a poem can be as lethal as the atomic bomb.

even if some times my scream is so painful that i can’t breath, i prefer to offer genealogy because it jumps over my silly little circumstances and look directly to mankind’s eyes.

i travel further when i am not i, but us.