by Martin Brown

Tim Booth appeared on stage on crutches for this show. There was a muffled explanation in Spanish from one of his bandmates, but I didn’t catch it. So he sat for most of the show. This must have been very, very difficult for one normally so active! Known for his spasmodic whirling and spinning, he cut a different figure here. He has also shaved his head since I last saw him play.

I really like James, so this is not really a very objective review. I had not seen them play live for more than 10 years. Of course, they were inactive during most of that time, with all kinds of reported bust ups. Let’s just all be grateful that the issues have now been resolved. With a new album out last month, and based on the fanatical crowd at this show, the future looks good again!

I could feel Booth’s pain as he sang Born of Frustration, he wanted to be on his feet, not in a chair! The voice is the same, pure, unique sound as ever and the band seemed very happy to be there. Andy Diagram, resplendent in a spotted dress, blew his trumpet and compensated for Booth’s immobility by running all over the place throughout the show. There is not just one front man in this band, that’s for sure. Maybe that was the problem before?

Running through material from their 20+ year career, each song was greeted with screams for the 1500 or so people in attendance. It’s always amazing to me that, whilst most Spanish people seem reluctant to learn English, they are happy, and very able to sing the words to every song of their favorite performers!

Towards the end of the almost two hour set, Booth said, “We said we were not going to play this song for a year, but we are going to sing it for you tonight, because I am sitting down!” The crowd went nuts and sang along with the band.

The band looked genuinely surprised by the length and passion of the responses to the songs, especially after Sometimes, when the crowd continued, a capella, long after the band had stopped playing.
This was a lot of fun, for the crowd and the band, the perfect scenario for any concert.

by Will Cade

As my favorite Primus song goes, “Paranoia is a disease unto itself. And may I add that the person standing next to you may not be who they appear to be.” If you read my last blog, “La Bloguera,” I owe you an apology: My paranoia got the best of me.

Originally, I couldn’t find Yoani Sanchez’s blog, Generation Y, so I assumed that the Cuban Government had not only restricted her from coming to Spain to receive the Ortega and Gasset Award for Digital Journalism, but it had taken her website offline as well. After some serious, journalistic investigation, I discovered that I had actually typed in the wrong website. Ha… yea… my bad.

But I’ve found her blog today, and after reading a bit, I can see why Raul Castro doesn’t want this woman leaving the country: she reveals the inadequacies of the Cuban government with a sense of humor gentle enough to make you smile yet poignant enough to make you protest. Her honesty is literally transparent, being that she posted a digital copy of her Cuban ID card - identification number, thumb-print, and all.

Sanchez didn’t set out to become an activist blogger. At first she aspired to be a Spanish linguist. After a few years in the academic world, though, she grew tired of the abstract and ineffective (like so many that came before her) and decided to pursue technology. She became an I.T. specialist and eventually was reborn as La Bloguera, merging her areas of expertise in the most logical and effective way.

Her current profession is paying off. She is blogging in Spanish, English, and German about life under the Cuban Dictatorship, and her Spanish blogs are receiving up to 5,000 comments each, with her most recent recieving over 2,000 in under two days. She can still get the word out, even if she herself cannot.

If you’re hesitant to read her blog, expecting it to be filled with communist horror stories, fear not: Her writing style is more playful than philosophical. I once heard that a writer’s style is the candy coating that let’s you swallow the theme. It’s safe to say that after reading Yoani Sanchez, I’ve been popping back Genearation Y like a handful of skittles.

http://desdecuba.com/generaciony/

by Will Cade

Every news agency around the world is covering the disaster relief efforts for the cylone ravished country of Burma (also known as Myanmar). 22,000 Burmese are dead, and allegedly some 1.5 million more are facing starvation and disease in the days to come. The Burmese Government, led by its Military Council, is currently accepting some aid packages from beyond its beyorders but is refusing aid workers and media crews. The media is covering every detail of these events as they unfold, yet only a few articles have even mentioned probably the most pertinent question: why would a government refuse help?

In my experience, people only refuse help if they are proud, they can actually handle it themselves, or they have something to hide. Being that corpses are still rotting in the streets days after the cyclone has passed, the Burmese Governemnt obviously can’t handle this on its own. On the same note, I don’t see how any government (even a military Dictatorship) could feel proud when its people are starving and dying in the street. So what possible explanations does that leave us, or, perhaps more accurately, what is the Burmese government trying to hide?

The Burmese Military Leaders are notoriously suspicious of westerners, even during times of stability - if that word can even apply to a country which brutally represseses any political opposition. When non-violent protests began in multiple cities in 2007, the government deployed riot police who at times fired live rounds into the crowds. The government later raided Buddhist monasteries to detain political dissidents. The exact accounts of these events are still disputed, in part because the government refused western journalists access and allegedly blocked all access to the internet.

If this repressive trend continues, we may never learn why the Burmese Government is refusing aid. The sad fact is that the Burmese government cannot seem to keep all information within its borders: the rising death toll is updated almost by the hour.

by Will Cade

Where I’m from in the States, some young people are scared to put their wild party pictures on Facebook or MySpace, in case their current or future employers frown on such things. Many of my older friends have even removed their Wall-post section, so their boss can’t read into their private life. The U.S. may be called the land of the free, but business is obviously still business. The last thing someone would be scared of, though, is having problems with the government because of a party picture, a wall post, or a blog.

I read today that the Cuban Bloguera, Yoani Sanchez, has been awarded a prestigious Spanish Journalism Award - the Ortega and Gasset Prize in digital journalism - for her blog Generation Y. In it, Sanchez recounts her frustrations living under a communist government that considers freedom of expression to be as dangerous as an outbreak of the Bubonic Plague. She will not not even be able to receive her award here in Spain, because the Cuban government has denied her an exit Visa (and I thought Visa’s were only required to enter countries?)

As a fellow blogger and human being, I was curious to see what Sanchez has to say. But when I checked her blog online (www.desdecuba.com/generaciony) the website was “currently unavailable.” A coincidence, I wondered, or can dictatorships even shut down websites? I discovered that STRATO, the Internet Service Provider which manages her website, is based in Germany, which I doubt takes orders from the Cuban Government. Still I couldn’t read Sanchez’s writing, so I did the next most informative thing I could think of: I got on Facebook.

I wasn’t even sure if Facebook was legal in Cuba, and at first I had a hard time finding real Cubanos (not just people named Cuba). I eventually found a few Cuban groups which looked both politically grounded and open minded, until I saw that they were based out of the U.S. and Sweden. Finally, I found the group “Cubans on Facebook,” but it was a closed group, so I couldn’t learn that much. After hearing what is happening with Yoani Sanchez, though, I didn’t blame them for publicly guarding their privacy: They might lose more than their jobs if word got out what they were doing in their free time.

by Lev Elgudin

If you look up the word quaint on dictionary.com, here’s what you’ll find:

quaint

–adjective, -er, -est.

2.	strange, peculiar, or unusual in an interesting, pleasing, or amusing way: a quaint sense of humor.

3.	skillfully or cleverly made.

After taking a five day rent-a-car road trip through southern France, I found that the word describes the historical charm of the region perfectly. And, as with all quaint places, a cheap, mapless, hippie-style ride through the side roads is a must.
The drive from Madrid to San Sebastián is about 4 hours with no traffic, which means about 5 hours in real life. Not too long if you’re used to driving longer distances, plus with beautiful sights and a bit of mountain weaving on the way.
But me and my two friends wanted as much southern France time as we could get, so we didn’t stop on the way, and arrived in Donostia (Basque for San Sebastián) at approximately 1 am, just in time to meet a couch surfer (check out couchsurfing.com) who’d agreed to show us the bar scene. It seems like a cool city, certainly a separate future trip altogether. One weird thing about it: in Madrid, we’re used to “chinos” selling beer and food on the street at night; in San Sebastián they sell glow sticks and weird glowing spinning tops for a couple of euros. And no beer. Needless to say, I was distracted for hours.

Wednesday night’s sleep was both one of the most uncomfortable and satisfying of my life. After leaving Donostia at about 3:30 am, we drove out past the border into France just a few kilometres away. We found a quaint little field, off a small, woodsy road, and parked. We had a tent, but it was raining, and we were tired. So we did the logical thing: we slept in the car. As I received a last minute upgrade from Atesa for some unknown Spanish reason, our car was a Citroen C5, which is a relatively large sedan. So we piled our bags in the front two seats, moved them up as far as they went, flattened out the back seats and stretched out on top of our home-brought blankets and pillows with our feet in the trunk. With the three of us, it was a tight squeeze, but a few tokes and some wine had us good and passed out.

When we awoke, we found that our quaint little field was actually someone’s house, and the small woodsy road was actually part of a residential neighbourhood where people wake up early and get to work. By our 10 am wake up time, the street was bustling with activity. It was a holiday too in France, so we were greeted with a lot of weird looks and stares. What would you do if you saw three bleary-eyed strangers emerging from a seemingly abandoned car parked on the grass right next to your house? The didn’t seem to care though, so my respect for the French went up a lot.

The rest of the trip was filled with lots of French food and wine, delicious chocolate croissants, foie gras, and crepes. And lots of other things too. Here are some highlights.
Bordeaux: Le Fiacre sound bar (www.le-fiacre.com) is located near Place Rey-Berland in the centre of town. It’s a “post rock” punk bar which was relatively quiet on this Thursday night, but the bartender said it’s usually packed with locals and regulars. They have a live band in the basement every weekend, and how can you miss a bar that features acts like Pussydelic and Funky Freaks. The highlight of the night was when we started talking to a Parisian visiting the city on holiday. Boy, did he make a lot of hand motions. Lots of weaving and twirling, sometimes using both hands, seemingly unattached to what he was actually saying. Neither his English nor Spanish were very good, but that didn’t matter, his orchestra directing hands didn’t stop. Nice guy though.

Every little town: has a tourism office, and amazingly, from Thursday to Sunday, they were all closed. It’s amazing the Spanish have a worldwide reputation for not working a lot, the French work week is capped at 35 hours.
All small French villages are equipped with cool-looking cathedrals. Every single one.
Highways are crazy expensive, at least by US standards. The drive from Bordeaux to Toulouse is about 2 hours, but it cost 16 euros.
The road you want to be on if you’re not in a hurry is N1113, a side road that gets you from Bordeaux to Toulouse in about 4 hours. It’s filled with off-road fruit stands with delicious strawberries, a million chateaus for wine tasting mostly in the Graves area, and small little quaint villages that are seemingly all the same but somehow different.

On a final and abrupt note, I want to mention a February article in Time magazine (http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1720316,00.html) that states, among other wondrous statistics, 90% of French women over 50 are sexually active. To me, that’s incredible. But after spending some time in the south of France, I saw why. These small little quaint towns, there’s little to do but drink wine, eat foie, and have wild outdoor sex. It’s a beautiful country, I recommend a visit.

By Will Cade

I never know if I should give money to panhandlers or not. Reading their signs about having children and no job, I do feel for these people, but I never know if my money is going towards a hot meal for the family or a fresh bottle for mom or dad.

Street performers, however, fit into a different category. They’re providing me with entertainment, which, if I like, I’ll gladly pay for. What they do with the money is their own business: they worked for it.

My favorite street performers in Madrid have to be in the Metro, because they give me a much needed break from a busy day running around the city. We have some talented metro musicians here - and some not so talented - but there’s nothing like hearing African bongo drums or an acoustic version of Ave Maria echoing through the underground.

Even with these daily pick me ups in Madrid, I have to be the most impressed with the metro performers in Berlin, although at first I didn’t realize they were performing. Out of the blue, a homeless or otherwise scrappy looking individual would step onto the metro. But before asking anyone for money, this person would proudly lift a newspaper - one specifically written for the homeless to sell - and commence to give a speech.

Now, I don’t know a lick of German (aside from a few curse words) but still these speeches were magnificent. Sometimes they sounded like the diatribe of a madman, but they were given with enough vigor to inspire me to do whatever it was I couldn’t understand them saying. And other times they were given with such a smooth delivery that I felt like I was sitting in the Globe Theatre listening to Shakespeare, or, in this case, Goethe.

Not until these performances were finished would anyone even start to rummage through their pockets, and sometimes not until after the applause erupted into the metro with more intensity than the speech just given. It’s times like this when I’m not only happy to emtpy out my pockets, but I would gladly sit with these people over a coffee and listen to their stories - even if I don’t understand German.

by Will Cade

One of the most difficult things about learning another language has to be knowing what to say in passing. I can sit with a Spaniard over a cup of coffee and make my way through a conversation no problem. But if I run into a Spaniard in the street and try to talk, it’s like I’m an 8 year old getting up in front of the class to give a speech. I’ll stumble over my words and maybe even stumble into traffic.

Knowing what to say and when to say it are equally important. When I first moved into my apartment in Murcia, I wanted to be as friendly a neighbor as Mr. Rodgers, so I made a point to say hello to the other residents. This would usually happen on the elevator, yet whenever I said “hola,” the Spaniards looked at me like I was crazy. Naturally, I stopped saying hello, expecting to ride the elevator in silence. The Spaniards would then get on, ride up in a comfortable looking silence, and say “hasta luego” before walking out. Hold on, saying hello to a stranger is despicable, but saying goodbye is expected? Finicky, just plain finicky.

When I moved into my apartment in Madrid, I expected more of the same. Once again, I would pass people in the elevator, yet, to my surprise and eventual amazement, they would tell me “buenos dias.” And when they even said “hasta luego” afterwards, I almost did a backflip. Finally, Spain felt like my home in Tennessee, where you have to avoid large crowds if you don’t want to say hello to strangers in the street for hours at a time. But this habit of mine might cause me some problems here in Madrid. Do I say “hola” or “buenos dias?” Oh my, what if I say both?

By Khilen Mehta

If watching their arch rivals stride to their 31st league title with three games to spare wasn’t humiliating enough for Barcelona, then being forced to form a guard of honour at the Bernabeu will be heartbreaking. Some newspaper reports even went as far as to say that Eto’o and Deco sought yellow cards at the weekend just so they could avoid the shame of being present in the victorious guard!

Having to applaud their fiercest enemies onto the field on Wednesday night will just be the start of a turbulent few weeks for the club as they prepare for some high-profile departures. Barcelona are also struggling to overcome Villareal into second place as they seek a morale boosting victory on Wednesday night. Victory over Real Madrid may salvage what little pride there remains this season but many key players have already stated that they may look for fresh pastures if the current instability continues.

For Real Madrid, there could be no better way to continue their celebrations. Although many fans would have secretely hoped that they could have won the league against Barcelona, watching their rivals squirm during the guard of honour will provide immense satisfaction. It has been a fantastic season for Bernd Schuster’s team. They have been dominant in the league and most impressively they won it in style, an important attribute which contrasts with the previous stress on unity of the Capello regime.

The fans will have been most impressed with the never say die attitude of the team, especially visible at the weekend. Down to 10 men and a goal down with 6 minutes to go, Real fought back magnificently to reclaim their title. Madrid is known as the city that never sleeps and it was easy to see why. The party started almost immediately in Plaza de Cibeles as thousands of fans flocked down to the square till the early morning and with the help of music and alcohol, gave their team an almighty celebration to commemorate their achievements. The fans may have left in the early hours but it didn’t stop there as the cleaners got to work on the estimated 10,000 kilos of rubbish that had been left behind in the process!!

So El Clásico descends upon us again. There may be no trophies at stake this year but the battle for pride and bragging rights remains as fierce as ever.

by Will Cade

I’ve never been so gratefulfor a glass of tap water until I came to Madrid. You can walk into any restaurant, ask for a glass (for free, even) and actually drink it.

This fall, I studied at the University of Murcia in the south - my first ever experience in Spain. If you asked for a water in a restaurant there, they would bring you a bottle. You could ask for free tap water, but you might as well ask for a sifter to clean out the sand and whatever other goodies were floating around. The director of my program told me the water was drinkable; it just tasted bad. But my Spanish friend who actually worked at the water treatment plant told me otherwise. I forget what exactly the harmful particles were (lead, maybe?) but it was more than enough to send me to the store a few times a week for a 6-litre bottle, just to drink in my piso.

For when I had class, I tried buying individually bottled water, but I would finish one off by noon, thanks to southern Spain’s desert climate (Tennessee, where I’m from, is almost as humid as the Amazon). I would then either have to drop an enormously expensive 60 centimos into a vending machine, or - and this still gives me the willies - drink it del grifo. I needed to buy a bigger water bottle, I decided, but one that I could refill myself.

Being that Spain has one of the most arid regions in Europe, you’d think that Murcia would have a high demand for sports bottles, or at least reusable water bottles. But when I asked around at different stores, all the salespeople said “no” and looked at me like I was asking for that new pair of Nike’s that let’s you fly.

I had no other choice: I had to go to El Corte Inglés - that lovely Spanish version of a Super Wal-Mart injected with a pure dose of high-value consumerism. Ah, I was right at home, but I hated myself for being so American. I immediately found a climber’s bottle with an opening and closing lip, an unbreakable body, and a touch screen GPS, all for only 15 euros. Perfect!

This bottle served me well in Murcia and when I was traveling around before coming to Madrid. Whether I was in class or in Italy, I could pull out my handy-dandy bottle and get a quick sip. Ironically, though, whenever I pull it out in public in Madrid, the Spaniards always seem to look at me strange. Why doesn’t he just take a glass of water at a café? I imagine them thinking.

by Will Cade

I’ve seen some strange things in the Madrid metro. I’ve seen punks; I’ve seen beggars. I’ve seen performers, and I’ve seen dealers. I’ve almost seen fighters, and I think I’ve even seen a couple of hookers. But I never thought I would see anything that even remotely looked like love, riding underneath Madrid with the dirty, discarded newspapers swirling in the dark tunnels behind me.

One night last week, I went down into the metro to catch my line home, but I had just missed it. I sat down and did what the Metro forces you to do: wait. A few minutes later, a couple sat down next to me. At first, as usual, I moved my bag into my lap and gave my pockets a quick check, in case someone made a go for my wallet or, more importantly, the writing pad in my back pocket which looks like a wallet.

The couple hadn’t robbed me: they seemed to be far more concerned with one another. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the man rubbing the woman’s stomach while she rested her head on his shoulder. Oh get a room, I thought, once again reminding myself of my distaste for public displays of affection, even if only in the privacy of my own mind.

The metro arrived, and when we got on, they ended up sitting directly across from me. It was then I noticed that the woman did look rather pale. The man commenced rubbing her stomach with one hand, while holding what I then realized to be a purple box of prunes in the other. Dear God, I thought, piecing together the situation, that’s love.

For a moment I wished I was a doctor and could have offered them my card and told them to give me a call, that we could work everything out (for they looked neither European nor wealthy). But, unfortunately, I’m not a doctor, and I needed to get off at the next station.

They continued on, to where, I’ll probably never know, because I doubt I will ever see them again. But I also doubt I will be able to forget them anytime soon, for never before have I seen such a loving and caring display of affection, on the metro or otherwise.