Pardon my english but this will be a series of posts in the language of the Island. It’s an essay I wrote sometime back concerning comic books, street-smarts, history, Dostoyevsky, Warren Ellis, Allan Moore, Junot Diaz and Bakhtin. It was quite experimental in form but succeeded in it’s purpose nonetheless. I will break it down in thematic sections and use the capabilities the internet provides me with to give it some extra spin, something I couldn’t do in it’s original printed form and which significantly limits an internet auteur such as myself. Here we go, and please enjoy and send feedback my way.
(This is also for all of you my ever-complaining English speaking friends).

essay reading and how ideas fuck each others brains out

Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona.

Through serious cultural tourism you get to have a point of view on how life in England in the 50′s used to be. How incidents in Athens affected people you don’t know. How ships where build for war and how they were used for peace, and the stories of the place around them. You learn how to articulate what you are seeing. In essence you cultivate different voices within you. You don’t hold the truth, Bakhtin would dismiss that claim for sure, but you can peer at it. You see, popular culture and polyphony are taken on by the street, by one’s instinct and are used to re-synthesise bits of information to make a picture clearer, thus restoring empathy, broadening minds and transfer us on the scene of transgressions that we were not eye witnesses of. And the containment of those truths, ideas and voices, allow them to breed inside you and give birth to new ones, and you yourself then participate and become one more voice, that becomes one more small bit of the truth.

«It is the fact of mutual addressivity, of engagement, and of commitment to the context of real life events that distinguish the truth from untruth.»

The concept of cultural “remote” tourism, is an idea that’s been thrown around a lot in the past decade. Because of the Internet, the ease of traveling over great distances and the continuously lowering costs of it, the world has become a much smaller place.

It has become a faster place. And in strange way, it has grown more superficial.

In 2008, Woody Allen released the film “Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona”. The film achieved a certain degree of notoriety thanks to a scene where Scarlet Johansson makes out with Penelope Cruz.

Otherwise it was criticized for being too “superficial” in it’s description of the relationships between it’s protagonists and how their stories unfolded.

I, on the other hand, found it as a quite deep description of this “superficiality” of the modern tourist. Vicky and Cristina, two american college students played by Scarlet Johansson and Rebecca Hall, arrive in Barcelona for the summer to enjoy the sun and Gaudi’s architecture and sculptures, where they get entangled in the life of a painter played by Javier Bardem. Regardless of the storyline of the film, my take on it was this, after the credits had rolled: Two american tourists visited Barcelona, got entangled in the lives of natives, affecting them in deep ways that would echo throughout them by all probabilities, and becoming part of them as well, but in the end leave to go back to their regular lives. The effect that they had on the local life, is of no consequence to them. They will have some stories to tell, while the people left behind will be the ones living with them.

In a sense, no originality, no spiritual enlightenment has occurred. Only superficial entertainment that ended as soon as the summer was through. It was an experience purchased with their airline ticket. in this sense, a person reading and dreaming about barcelona is not less in touch with it’s spirit than this type of modern tourist is.

It could leave a profound mark on his psyche, or it may pass unnoticed.

In this sense, we all are cultural “remote” tourists.

This offers a seriously more superficial experience (since it’s not actually lived) but on the other hand, opens the doors to an ability to read a stimulation through so many different texts that could somehow make up for the lack of lived experiences (or experienced experiences).

End of part 3