Barcelona Inc.
Living deep in the barrio you are surrounded by the past. It's there etched on every street, every iconic paving stone, every doorway, every face of a certain vintage. But where does history end and mythology begin?
I wrote this a few years ago:
Catalunya FGC station is a good example. For better or worse, they're all long gone now, the charming old green trains, the smokers lined up inside the station bar, the erotic cinemas and shoeshines, the young dazed junkie selling ringing alarm clocks at the tunnel entrance…
And then emerging up the steps on to the Ramblas - the hawkers punting heavy tar Marlboros on the steps, the old men outside in their high waist trousers engaged in loud debate, the attendant in the peaked cap charging people to sit on the neatly assembled chairs, the caged canaries, the old barber Santos, the three card tricksters, the man dancing to tango whilst strapped to a lifesize doll, the keepie uppie footballer and the human statues coated in gold paint in the 30C heat, the politics & porn of Interviu nestling alongside Karl Marx and the Guías de Ocio on the quiosco magazine racks...
Only the Canaletes fountain remains intact, a ritual meeting point for celebrating Barça fans after increasingly rare European triumphs..
Everyday I read Catalans arguing passionately about whether the city is a better or worse place now, the same soul searching as anywhere else undergoing rapid automation, online revolutions in retail and dramatic cultural and fast demographic change. Often, all that remains of the old streets are the ONCE booths, the TABACS and farmacias passed down the generations.
The music shops which once defined Carrer Tallers are all gone, with Revolver the last stand for that independent rock spirit where the gigs were listed with a green marker pen on a suspended whiteboard dangling outside, flogging tickets for 2000 pesetas to anyone prepared to watch Moby go berserk at Sala Apolo on an autumnal Thursday night.
There are still pockets of resistance, like for instance the bar Teruel on Carrer Girona, a regular pitstop into town. The football screen nobody watches, the gobby barfly cuñado mouthing off to the idle bottles of cognac on the shelves, the lovers’ tiff on a nearby table with the woman calling her hapless boyfriend a subnormal and storming out. The raw human stories playing out that you never see in the cold, posturing modern coctelerías with their overpriced beers and smirking baristas.
For now my barrio Clot holds out. There are menús del día within reach and a market square brimming with life, but for how much longer? Around us Local community associations are fighting to survive and old shops are continually giving way to trash products, trash graffiti and trash food. Everything feels on borrowed time but the urgent debate the pandemic triggered about what or - more pertinently - who modern cities are for has sadly petered out.
I once found myself at some talk given by local politician Germà Bel (a deep man of conviction who has been both a socialista and a member of the conservative Junts) evangelising about this 'exciting global hub of commerce' drawing in people from around the world, ‘happily eating calamares and gambas in new hotels around Eixample’ and when I challenged him afterwards he seemed genuinely startled that this English weirdo with a strange accent wasn’t on the same ‘journey’.
It seemed to epitomise the ongoing struggle between the romantics and the money men but in order to better understand it is necessary to study the history, and specifically the history of the brand - the marca. Historically, all sorts of cultural forces have driven the marca, from Messi to Cruyff, from Miró to Gaudí, from Mercury to Caballé, from Samaranch to Maragall, from that white albino gorilla to S Club 7 - and of course the EU top brass who for years have aggressively advocated a tourist economy on Europe’s southern flanks.
Visitors to the city arrive in their millions for all kinds of reasons, some to gawp at modernist art or architecture, others to wear inflatable penises or Mexican hats, others to find inner meaning on ketamine at Nitsa or on the beach whilst drinking cans of Estrella, retrieved only minutes earlier from a nearby sewer (where they are stored by an army of unlicensed and badly exploited vendors from faraway lands).
Cheap air/cruise travel and the digitalisation of communication certainly put Barcelona on the map in a way it wasn’t when I first lived here. There was still a veneer of cool about the city in 1995 in so far as the only outsiders were teachers, backpackers or students, whilst a nascent clubbing scene was steadily becoming more sophisticated, evolving from turbo charged makina to the more cerebral sounds of Orbital or Autechre. But much as I imagined us as trailblazers we weren’t the first. There were always foreigners in the old town going back to 1888, even if they occasionally took the form of US navvies on shore leave, indiscreetly passing through the Sala Peep X - an obligatory rite of passage for generations of seamen…
From the 60s to the 80s, Barcelona periodically appeared in the global consciousness, such as the 1965 Beatles gig at the Monumental bullring and the films The Castle of Fu Manchu (1969) and The Passenger (1975) featuring Jack Nicholson, and then again in the tv series Love Boat (1986). A city with limited global exposure during the dictatorship was suddenly seen on screens all over the world. Saturation coverage followed for the Olympic Games (1992) before Pedro Almodóvar filmed Todo Sobre Mi Madre (1999), whilst Woody Allen evangelised about the city to anyone who would listen, both as jazz musician and then as a director himself, serving up the execrable Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) which sealed the deal (if not the city’s fate..) for a generation of glossy lifestyle travellers entranced by the mystique.
It then felt like it really was all over. But the city is resilient and more phlegmatic than the wailing suggests. People adapt because they have to. And so multiple Barcelonas have sprung up. The one they see - and the one we live.