celia cruz risen from the dead

fiestas en lavapiés. yesterday three chicks in g-strings, feather headpieces and very high heels passed beneath the window to the thunder of deafening samba drums. now I think santana is playing, somewhere around the corner; celia cruz around the other corner.... it's monday and this thing is still going... since last thursday..... (though the jackhammers don't seem to be taking a holiday, pity.)

it's Spain and people are dancing in the streets! beer flowing and everyone, you know, just, living life...

being neurotic as i am, these sorts of things used to fascinate and entice me; i will admit to -in my early twenties- waxing orientalist, exoticist, exalting such vitality with all sorts of baroque adjectives... come to think of it, I don't think I would have ever learned spanish if I had not just lived a little bit of the vida loca, in some loca locales, dancing in the streets, blending in, as it were. i mean, alcohol and grammar are not such an unlikely mixture....

in the meanwhile, my bf's best friend's name is detritus. he's a painter and sufficiently quiet and intense to seem trustworthy. we went over to his place for lunch last saturday, and he made hotdogs. his goth girlfriend, who is very sweet, has the same half-shaved head haircut I had when I was 15 and used to got to revival on 3rd street back in phila... where we used to "dance" to joy division and bauhaus, when we were all pretty intense and flirted with complex topics like "atheism" and "mortality"....

now, I'm really not trying to be deprecatory, (is that a word? either way, it's what I'm not trying to do....) so, I tread lightly here. but something that stands out to me here, in spain, part of those exposed wires.... there're the hippies (jipis), the squatters (okupis) and there are the moderns (modernos). there are also the preppies (pijos) and the fascists (fachas.) (I wish I could figure out photos to post some examples.) it's sort of like a video game. or a big reality show. everybody has their uniform, you know?
what I'm not trying to not be deprecatory about is relating it, sort of, to high school.

i probably see it that way because i am observing it absolutely superficially and I mostly don't leave the house except to get my ¡jamón jamón!-flavor potato chips. but anyway, (here's where I get really insightful...) maybe that there's this not-so-long-ago legacy of dictatorship, everybody's still sort of rebelling against the teachers and their parents.

I know we americans are all supposed to be big 'ol flakes, but, I dunno, i have this sense that we're a bit less obvious than the europeans

or maybe it's all just relative.

or very possibly I have no sense of nuance.

to be articulated.