Dennis Hollingsworth

Caca, Cuts and Vomit

Beware, people.... visiting us here in Tossa will cost you.

You may recall the fate of our last visitors, Joel and Tiff. Tiff and I embarked on an expedition to snorkel around the rock formation that is Tossa. Tiff was taking on water and when we clambered out onto the rocks, she was swept up by the swell and smashed onto the barnacle encrusted rock. Bleeding, we gingerly crawled over the rocks to safety, having to ford a huge ravine along the way.

(Joels' father is a doctor, it must come natural for him.)

Fast forward to our next visitors, Dave Deany and Phil Wagner. We went to Barcelona to visit them as they install Jorge Pardo's show at La Caixa Forum in Montjuic. Dave and Phil are painters orignially from Illinios who were canny enough to find work for Jorge in ChinaTown LA, that's where we met.

The Caixa Forum is another institutional venue for the artworld, the building used to be a textile factory, an interesting assemblage of bricks, incredibly simple and direct.

So we drop in to see the handiwork of Dave and Phil, and to marvel at the company of friends so far removed from ChinaTown. They tell us that they had the weekend off and we suggested they spend it in Tossa.
Here's Dave in the room hung in thousands of pounds of MDF board that has been computer cut with undulating waveforms and painted orange:

Here's Phil, who is working so hard, I could only get a blurred image:

The idea is to have this room lit up with Pardo signature lamps and to have other art star pieces (I forget the names, big time art star types) from some collection (mabe the Forum's) hung on the orange walls. Pardo, the elaborated art container, the anti- "white cube".

I think he should have hung Dave and Phil's paintings instead.

ANYWAY, the guys decided to accompany us on our bus back home to Tossa, very delightful. As we sat at the bus station, we were talking so much, we missed the bus and we had to take the next one, close to midnight. Phil was starving, so he hunted for food at the bus station and he found this cheese sandwich.

I remember looking at the sandwich... I didn't have the articulated thought that the cheese was iffy... but I remember looking twice at it. As the bus wheeled onto the highway, Phil begins groaning... then sweating... then he had to unbuckle his belt, his belly swollen.

(Shall I get into the details?
...OK, just a few more...)

The ride is over an hour long. It's a double decker bus, we were sitting in the very front seats above and the bus is nearly packed with Germans mostly, youngsters who are headed to the town just south of Tossa, Lloret. There's a row that's nearly empty in the rear and Phil manages to stumble back there with Dave's ziplock bag once used for soap.

Essential travel tip: throw in a ziplock baggie into your bag, just in case.

As we arrive into Tossa (the last segment of the drive is on extremely winding mountain roads, fast and swervy), the baggie is filled. Phil was thankful for the mechanical plastic fastener of the high quality consumer product. The wonder of night timeTossa was diminished a bit for Phil as he suffered into the wee hours of the morning. He said he couldn't even keep water down.

Now, that's some cheese for you!

The next day was tender as you might imagine. Dave and I went for a vigorous snorkel. I showed off with many stunts meant to arouse wonder and astonishment. We chose a prime spot in the edge of the little cove, it was packed with people. Phil was getting back to the living again.

That afternoon, we went to a restaurant, a favorite pizza place where the people are smiling so much it's awkward sometimes jsut to walk by. There's much talk of the night before and the new set of abdominal muscles that Phil had aqcuired overnight. We tell the waitress (the owner, I assume) of Phil's travails and she lectures us that we must eat only bread and bottled water as we travel. You can't trust anyone, she said in spanish. This, she said as she was setting down the grilled sardines, pizzas and white beans. Phil, Stephanie and I remembered that one funny fish at the end of the plate. It wasn't as roasted as much as the others... or something. It was of a different color, the rest were carbonized brown... this one was blueish and fatter than the rest. Phil took a pass, he wasn't a natural fan of the sardine. Stephanie chose a different fish than that blue one. Dave's fork stabbed that remarkable fish before I took my turn.

Later that evening, Dave got to see that fish again. He said it was the most dramatic body flushing of his life, a fountain on two ends. (This happened as Stephanie and I were having drinks with the collector family mentioned in the previous blogpost. The guys were napping, supposedly.) Dave recovered enough to report the bad news as we were grilling chicken (bad choice, I guess). At first, I asserted that there must be some germ warfare contaigon going on, the coincidence was too strong. Then, the memory of the unique sardine dawned on us. Slowly, and then with such amazement!

Oh, and the Caca?

Yes, it does rhyme very nicely. But aside from the abiding Catalonian theme of excrement in the form of the caganeras (little sculptures of shitting figures that adorn the rear of Xmas nativity scenes, a remnant of some misty pre-Christian past, I assume), the day in Barcelona was punctuated with two references to this nether world.

First was my attempt to pronounce "Caixa" as I was asking for the location of the Forum, the ladies at the information booth at the Placa Espa?a bust our laughing. Naif that I am. Apparently to their ears, I had asked where the Shitty Forum was located.

Secondly, whilst we were waiting for Dave and Phil to show up at the bus station, Stephanie and I had appetizers at a restaurant near the station. Muy delicioso... and at the table next to ours was a family: mother, father and little girl. The girl was muy precioso and active. When she would touch the ground or the street, the parents would say: "?No! ?Caca!".

Ah! That brought me back to my childhood.

UPDATE: Dave adn Phil returned from the opening to report that a total of six people came down with the illness, Jorge too. AHEM. My deepest apologies to the hospitality industry here in Catalonia... Funny, how the mind finds a pattern whether there is one or not.

One the other hand, the contagion suspicion was spot on... nothing yet to support the biowarfare lab experiment gone awry. Or maybe it's an Al Queda trial run?