I sat
there on the dusty balcony, smoking Ducados brand cigarettes (and yes, they do
kind of taste like shit; what I imagine shit would taste like I mean), the
dusty balcony littered with the tools and such of association with an
artist. This balcony was of the apartment of a friend from college and
her boyfriend, the apartment that I kind of high-jacked with my much
unannounced visit to Seville, since my entire trip to Spain was gathered and
formulated within a few days and then I was off!
I sat
there on that dusty balcony, mindlessly glancing off at the sunset; a very odd
sunset I might add. Not in any way similar or striking any familiarities
to those I anxiously awaited in Santa Barbara or those of the winter on the
West coast of Korea at the beach. This sunset produced one of the oddest
skylines I have ever had the pleasure (or mishap) of observing. The haze
of a very warm Andalusia Spring day was starting to settle, creating an aura
filled with a canvas of oranges, pinks, salmons and ironically enough grays,
painting all the buildings in my view in an unsettling early evening ‘vampire
walks in daylight’ persona.
Off in
the distance, there was a bridge, going where, I could not know. I guess
it went across the river that I never really took the time to examine that
split the city, creating one side that was old, quaint, traditional and the
other, modern, contemporary and rather run down (The 1992 World’s Fair grounds
in Seville look an absolute hot mess!). The cars on this bridge, most of
which I chose to imagine as dinky little red and yellowish Fiats, hustled by in
their perspective directions. Probably commuters, trying to make their
ways home, from what had been a very tiring day (at least it was for
me!).
Since my arrival was very badly timed, say the week after Feria,
everyone was either worn out or had to work during the days, which left me to
sight see and tour all by my lonesome. Having been talked into taking
some silly bus tour by a pretty cool Scandinavian guy, who I think was selling
tour tickets to make money to return to Scandinavia, I spent much of the day
zooming across the rather attractive city, taking pictures, being a
tourist. Well, I was so much into being a true tourist that I became
entranced by some statues at the Plaza de Espana and missed the departure of my
beloved, double-decker tour bus. This meant that I had to walk a very
long way back to the city bus stop to go back to my friends’ apartment!
To think I never once picked up a transit map!)
That
bridge, although rather intriguing and an integral part of that portrait frozen
in my mind however, was not the sight that has remained with me for the few years
since that trip. Oh no! Not a landmark or something everyone else
would remember after spending two weeks in a foreign country! Something
else remains beautiful and vulgar about that skyline that day: all those
damn television antennae, obtrusively poking up into the sky from their
apartment building foundations!
It still
perplexes me to think of all of those antennae present in that narrow frame of
sight.
Now, this journey to Southern Spain was not that long ago and I
know that cable television was present in that neighborhood, which begs me to
question why people still had antennae up on their buildings! For
posterity?
Did each building, with each of its apartment units, have a
grumpy old man or woman living in it, who just had to have their little
television with knobs that only picked up two or three channels because the
box’s antenna had broken decades earlier and had been replaced by a coat hanger
(and not even an ordinary coat hanger, but one of the really thin ones painted
white that dry cleaners insist giving to you, even when you ask them politely
to use one of the nice hangers you leave with them and after you tip them
generously)? Were the antennae the last bit of independence these
nostalgic tenants had, as in the right to say ‘to hell with paying for TV, I
like crappy news and even crappier reruns!’ (Of whatever shows older folks like
to watch over and over again in Spain. I didn’t watch any television
while I was there, so I don’t know; probably amazingly annoying variety shows
hosted by ‘has-been’ actresses with way too much collagen in their lips and
older ‘gentlemen’ with sick reputations for inappropriately touching female
guests?)?
My mind
is a swamp, with many diversions and thought traps.
So back
to these antennae. They truly left an impression on my reality that I
think may have seriously altered my entire perception of the nation of Spain
and its people. When I first began teaching in Miami Beach, I had an
intermediate class with two students from Spain. For the first week of
class, all I wanted to do was ask them if their houses and/or apartment
buildings had an antenna (or antennae) mounted on their roofs. Then,
naturally, if they had cable television and if so why had no one ever removed
the old antenna? Actually, what really holds my focus on the matter (and
probably is wrecking my subconscious) is that this phenomenon of leaving old
antenna mounted on the tops of buildings is not limited to Spain. Hell,
now that I think about it there were tons of antennae on roofs all across
Seoul!
My grandmother’s house had an antenna. A really big, small
engine jet wingspan antenna! A few years after this Spain trip, I was at
her house and happened to be outside and looked up at that thing and out of
nowhere got a rush of unexplainable anxiety; so much that I grabbed the
tools and took that ridiculous monster down! Why did that house still
have a television antenna? She’d had cable television since Clinton was
president, so why was that metal eyesores still hanging out on her roof, saying
‘people still watch analog TV!’ I wonder once the Great American Digital
Transition is done, how many homes in my hometown will still have antennae
mounted on their roofs, like sentinels standing guard, ready and willing for
something absurd to happen, like a surprise attack from South Carolina or the
command call for the South to rise again will coming through an analog system
and broadcasting on Channel 40!
To this
day I never see just a television antenna when I see one holding court up in the
air. Perhaps it’s all due to that cityscape in Sevilla etched into my brain
flaps. I often wonder just how significant that moment really was.
I recall my life at the time and all that had happened and was about to happen
and it seems that that early evening, sitting on that little balcony of the
high-jacked apartment, much like the two weeks of aimless ‘sightseeing’ and
random conversations in almost senile Spanish I had with store clerks (another
tar pit in my mind swamp; nothing teaches you to appreciate the diversity and
beauty of all the world’s differences like asking for a pack of Marlboros and
realizing you’re asking in Korean; when you are in Spain; and you are not
Asian; and the person you’re talking to doesn’t quite know which Asian language
you’re speaking, but he knows that the language is from Asia, but you aren’t,
yet he just nods his head, smiles, recognizes the word ‘Marlboro’ and everyone
just smiles!), marked a very profound end of something and a daunting, yet very
exciting start of something new.
Maybe it
was the indescribable feeling that I felt as I peered across the forest of
antennae towards the bridge and the sunset. The feeling of being
completely alien to everything around me, so foreign to the character and
chemistry of the space I occupied, yet inexplicably tied to it all and unable
to find the source of that link. That no matter where I went or what
happened, I would be an integral part of that picture and all those useless
antennae, regardless of what I thought of them or why they existed as they
did. That, even if only for just one moment of a life still yet to come,
on a balcony of an apartment that I probably would never see again, in a
country of people that I might soon forget, I stood, in wonder, over electric
skies.
Seville, Spain (April, 2005)
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