Snob

 
For those women who would like to wake up in the morning with a smile on their faces, then look no further than the Little Rooster the world’s first alarm clock specifically designed to wake you up with slowly increasing pleasure.

The Little Rooster (“The raciest alarm clock in the world”—Glamour Magazine) gets you up by getting you off. According to the website, all you have to do to guarantee a pleasurable start to the day is:

Slip Little Rooster into the front of your panties with its leg nestling between your thighs.

Within seconds you forget it is there. 

Toss and turn - it stays in place. 

No part of Little Rooster is worn internally. 

What makes Little Rooster really special is that delicious semi-conscious state when you are not yet quite awake.

Other alarms tear those precious moments from you.  Little Rooster not only lets you savour them, it makes them even dreamier.

One of these panty-alarm clocks will cost you $64, which includes the following options for using the device:

Snooze: the classic lie-in.

Snorgasm: Little Rooster‘s power falls to a very low level so you fall in and out of “happy” slumber. Then the power slowly increases, waking you as sensually as before.

Travel lock. New Little Rooster vibrates in your panties, not in your purse.

Fully personalisable.  Adjust how gently the sensations start, how quickly they increase, how intensely they peak, the snorgasm level.

Rechargeable.  And built with green PWM technology.

Perfect for couples: you’ll both wake up smiling.

Play. For when it is time to take control.

Sabotage Times have an interview with Little Rooster designer Tony Maggs, who explains that he spent two years working on the alarm clock, during which time he made over 300 prototypes. Dina Murphy who interviewed Maggs also tested out the Little Rooster and you can read her article here.

If this tickles your fancy, then check out the Little Rooster site.
 

 
Via Sabotage Times

(Photo: Jackie)

According to a paper released by Patricia J. Yang, Jonathan C. Pham, Jerome Choo and David L. Hu, mammals pee for roughly the same period of time. Both very large and very small mammals take about 21 seconds to empty their bladders with a standard deviation of 13 seconds.

The scientists call their discovery “The Law of Urination.”

How do large mammals empty their more voluminous bladders as quickly as smaller mammals? Their longer urethras amplify the gravitational force and thus create a higher fluid flow rate. The urinary system is thus an evolutionary marvel that can “be scaled up without compromising its function.”

-via Dave Barry

Although medical science has been dimly aware of this female sexual organ for some time, it took until 1998 for researchers to discover the actual size and scope of the clitoris. To put that into perspective, we've had DVDs since 1995. Let's help get the word out.

ORIGINAL: By Sophia Wallace.

I didn't think anything could rattle my confidence in the original "Star Wars" trilogy, but Colin Stokes is doing just that. Check out 6:20 for a rundown of the Bechdel Test and 8:37 for a total bummer of a statistic. The real dynamite hit me at 9:55 when Stokes questioned the efficacy of girl power in a culture of boy power.

ORIGINAL: By Colin Stokes and TEDx.

read more

VH1/ The Pickup Artist

I first turned to the pickup artists after losing in love. Or, to be precise, winning—and then losing. Rachel and I had followed each other silently around our university’s campus in the way that only a university campus allows. We had “fortuitous” meetings in the café (where we each knew the other would be); tried to overhear conversations in the stairwells (where we formed ridiculously false portraits of each other); and, closest of all to real contact, sat next to each other once in the library (where we got no work done). This went on for the better part of a year, during which she kept the top position in my imagination’s rankings, the position we reserve for the woman we are going to marry, but who just doesn’t know it yet. And then one day we met. One of my friends knew one of her friends; they came over to talk; we were introduced. I was the older, wiser graduate student, she the impressed undergraduate—but not too impressed, because she was from New York City—and she later admitted that when she asked me out the next week she was nearly certain I would turn her down uncomfortably. We met for drinks at the bar where no one goes, walked back to my house, started drinking again, and eventually made it out to my back porch. The kiss was the giveaway. Rachel was frantic—not sexually, but passionately—and I was so cocky that I calmed her, like a skittish horse: “easy … easy.” And so, from that moment, I was dissatisfied: her ass didn’t look right in her jeans, her breasts were too soft, her underwear was bizarre. I told my friends the following day it was a good thing she was leaving town for most of the summer, so I could get out guilt-free after a few weeks. For those who had ears to hear, what I was saying was, essentially: “Her ass didn’t look right in her jeans.”

It didn’t take long for everything to change. I came by foot to pick her up, walking down a street whose trees were finally becoming lush in the heat of May, and then up to a garden just as green. And there she was, in a white dress, only a few strands of hair falling to her neck. It was a moment of paralysis—like Werther’s first vision of Lotte, handing out bread to her siblings, in her white dress—but it was all mine, just for me. In that split second, I was lost.

It would be difficult to narrate the coming weeks, because they were a descent by small degrees from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows. We began happy, or at least I did. We spent an hour once cataloguing with astounding detail each of those times we had seen each other on campus. We spent another hour lying on the floor of my unfurnished living room, listening to Sigur Rós, kissing each other’s faces. I was handsome, she was beautiful; people told us we looked like each other. But little by little I began to lose control. I called her house too frequently, to the point of pestering her roommates. When we were together I couldn’t tear myself away: I would suggest picking up food and eating it at her house so that we didn’t have to be apart. Eventually it became clear that she was indulging me to avoid confrontation before she left for the summer. Not yet entirely out of my mind, I had a sense for what was going on, but it took a while for me to start hating myself. That began, properly, on the night we said goodbye. As she lay on her bed, already sleepy, I stood by the door, and she uttered what were assuredly the most poetic words I ever heard from her, before or since: “Remember, as you walk home through the night, be bold.” She chuckled afterwards, aware of her own pretense, but the message had already been sent.

Several painful months later, she told me in a parked car—we were already having frank philosophical conversations about our past—that once upon a time she had seen me in the library, at the head of a group of my friends, and thought: “That guy is a badass.” She thought that I was a man, just like her powerful father. The implication of the statement was obvious: I once was a man, but I wasn’t anymore. To be honest, I can’t say I disagreed with her at the time.

•

The pickup craze began in 2005, with the publication of Neil Strauss’s The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. The book remained high up on the New York Times Bestseller List for over a month, sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and spawned not only a follow-up by Strauss himself, but also countless imitations in print as well as a cable television show. Despite being packaged like a bible—leather-bound, gold leaf pages, and a tassel for a bookmark—and despite its chapter headings—”Select a Target,” “Approach and Open,” “Demonstrate Value,” “Disarm the Obstacles,” and so on—The Game is less a how-to book (say, a pickup “bible”) and more a narrative of the author’s time spent in the (then-underground) “pickup community.” And what a narrative it is: within the space of two years, Strauss was transformed from a short, skinny, balding, let’s-just-be-friends type into one of the greatest pickup artists in the world. At the height of his “gaming” activity he had eight steady sexual partners—who all knew about each other—and was maneuvering himself into threesomes on a regular basis. The Game is the Great American Success Story for the testosterone-driven, club-going male; it is easy to understand its popularity.

But the book has an unsettling and enchanting effect on the more old-fashioned among us as well, and in this the theme of manliness is front and center. Strauss’s primary contact in the world of the pickup artists, the man who indeed becomes his friend over the course of the narrative, is “Mystery”—the pseudonym of one Erik von Markovik, then already among the acknowledged leaders of the seduction community. And although Mystery is clearly indebted to the legends of seduction who preceded him—most prominent among them Ross Jeffries, the guru who applied the techniques of neurolinguistic programming to the hypnosis of women—his own method forms the basis of nearly every interaction in the book. Mystery is responsible for many innovations, to be sure, but the key to the method is, unquestionably, that the pickup artist ignore, tease, or even insult the targeted female, accustomed as she is to constant, beleaguering attention from men. That is, the message of the pickup artists is at its core an age-old one: women love men who are mean to them—or at least a little mean to them. If you believe that women want to be flattered, wooed and obeyed, we are told, guess again. Women want limits to be set, they want to be played with, they want manliness—and it is best to establish the dynamic right from the start. As Mystery puts it: “I don’t alienate ugly girls; I don’t alienate guys. I only alienate the girls I want to fuck.” And when the age-old message is tied to a comprehensive system that brings superior results—Mystery shows his students a portfolio of the models, actresses and strippers he has seduced—that message becomes difficult to resist. The good-hearted reader struggles as he feels his cherished notions slipping away: “If this is what women really want, then why shouldn’t I? …” Or: “Shouldn’t I get on board, while I am still young? Shouldn’t everyone experience this kind of life once?” Or, most painful of all: “If only I had done some of this when I met so-and-so…”

•

So how does it work? It begins in a bar. PUAs (pickup artists; this will be the first in a long line of acronyms and other assorted jargon) do often ply their trade during the day, sometimes even on the street—this is called “day game” and has its own nuances—but the classic location for seduction is the trendy club or bar. For the most part the pickup artist “sarges” alone (i.e., operates alone—the term comes from the name of one of the cats of an early pickup artist), but a “wingman” or “wing” can play a role as well (among other things, he makes the pickup artist who is “running the set” look good). After a target is chosen, she must be approached within three seconds—this is the “three-second rule,” one of Mystery’s inventions. The thought behind it is twofold: first, if a man looks for too long at a woman, she might begin to think he is creepy, or, possibly worse, a coward; and second, if a man looks for too long at a woman, he might indeed become a coward, he might lose his nerve. When it is time for an approach, the approach always comes from an angle, from ten o’clock; this is less intimidating, but also conveys sufficient confidence. The pickup artist always smiles.

The first words spoken to the group (and it will usually be a group, because “women of beauty are rarely found alone”) are an opener, which is delivered along with a false time constraint. The time constraint—”my friends are waiting for me so I have to go in a few minutes, but…”—serves to eliminate anxieties that the pickup artist will never leave; anyone who has been approached in a bar, male or female, knows this feeling. The pua opener—what follows the “but” in the time constraint—is unlike the come-on lines we have always heard: “Come here often?”; “What’s your sign?”; “I must be in heaven, because you are an angel.” The puaopener seeks instead to start a conversation, nothing more, nothing less. Typically, it asks for an opinion, which both makes the intrusion plausible and, even better, allows women to offer their advice (because who doesn’t love giving advice?). One opener that has been “field-tested,” the “jealous girlfriend” opener, asks the group what a friend (imaginary, of course) should do in the following situation: his new girlfriend has become more and more opposed to his continuing contact with his ex-girlfriend from college. Now, of course it makes sense that the current girlfriend should have pride of place. But the ex-girlfriend is just a friend at this point—and anyhow, they are still such important figures in each other’s lives! Is that really fair?

In the meantime, of course, the pickup artist needs to watch his body language—or train himself into the proper body language beforehand. PUAs are quite fond of watching movies with famously “alpha” protagonists—James Dean, Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt—and routinely copy their stances and gestures, practicing in front of a mirror. They seem to know everything that one could possibly desire to know: where to put their hands, where to put their feet, what to do with their weight. They know how to manipulate a woman out of her barstool so they can slide into the seated position (the position of power). They know how to rock backwards slightly when delivering openers—again, so that their interlocutors fear they might leave at any moment.

Soon it is time for a “neg.” Here is the insulting, the teasing—the alienation, as Mystery put it. When the opportunity arises, the pickup artist finally acknowledges his target, whom he has either been ignoring or only addressing as part of her group. But it is hardly an acknowledgment: it is a mild insult, or a backhanded compliment, and always delivered in as casual a way as possible so that the intention to insult can never be detected. At the target’s first attempt to join the conversation: “Whoa, your friend is pushy guys, is she always like that?” Or after she smiles: “Your nose is so cute; I love the way it wrinkles up.” The thought is that depriving a woman of attention and validation will lead her to seek it from you; Strauss puts it best when he says that to neg a woman is to treat her like a bratty little sister.

But the victory of the pickup artist can only be guaranteed by demonstrating value. In the abstract, this involves establishing that the pickup artist is different from other men, intriguing in some way, superior. Most of the time, however, because of the historical accident of the culture’s foremost practitioner having been interested in magic as a child, this is achieved via a number of pseudo-mystical “routines”: esp, handwriting analysis, various personality tests. (In Mystery’s own case, there are actual magic tricks involved, but he knows better than to introduce them as “magic tricks.”) In one routine, “the cube,” the target is asked to picture a cube in the desert. Then she is asked: How big is it? What is it made of? What color is it? Then she pictures a ladder, a horse, flowers, a storm. Sure enough, the cube represents her ego, the ladder her friends, the horse her lover (or her own sexuality), the flowers children, the storm her problems. Is the ladder leaning on the cube? Her friends depend on her. Is the horse bigger than the cube? She wants her lover to dominate her. And so on. That the details of the routine are purely arbitrary is not lost on the pickup artists—there exist bountiful variations, in which the terms are shifted around according to whim, the flowers representing one thing, the ladder another. The idea is just to get the target talking about herself, and in a style that comes naturally; after all this is “chick crack,” catnip to women, who according to the pickup artists love any and all psychological speculation, particularly when tinged with the supernatural. And the pickup artist displays his value by engaging the opposition precisely in that territory, the realm of fog and intuition; but he doesn’t just engage her in this realm, he dominates it, beating her at her own game. That is value.

The playbook has many, many pages left at this point: the target must be isolated; a connection must be made (something traditionalists try to do first but the pickup artist knows to do later); and comfort must be built to allow for an eventual transition to the “sex location.” (And on all of these subjects, and indeed on those above as well, there are thousands and thousands of posts on various internet forums.) But there is one more wanton and controversial play in the book that deserves mention: the neutralization of lmr—last-minute resistance. When the time comes, returning to the pickup artist’s house should be easy, since the target is familiar with the place from dropping by earlier in the night (the pickup artist needed to stop off quickly for something he forgot). Once she is in the front door, he accomplishes her transfer from living room to bedroom through an excuse like “I want to show you a video—but the television is in my room.” At this point in the seduction both parties know what is going on, but excuses do need to be made. In the bedroom (where there are no chairs), the pickup artist sits on the bed with the target, but nowhere near her (how confusing). When the time comes for physical escalation, he makes sure to always take two steps forward and one back. But at some point he could hit a wall—this is lmr. A woman, the pickup artists tell us, desires sex just as much as a man does; but because sex represents more of an investment for her, and because she has been culturally “programmed” to avoid the label “slut,” she will resist right up until the end. At the first sign of obstruction of this kind, the pickup artist can “blast” it with a “freeze-out.” The pants go on, the light goes on, the candles go out. The pickup artist is sorry, but when a woman tells him to stop, it kills the mood for him; he knows very well that no means no. Teased by something just out of her reach, the girl will eventually relent. If necessary, the pickup artist will again let his words take care of political correctness while his body takes care of what it wants: he will agree with her—”I know, this is so wrong, we shouldn’t be doing this”—all the while removing her clothes and encouraging her body along the path of its desire. In this as in all things the pickup artists are closers; they close the deal. They number-close, they k-close, they f-close. Number closing is getting a number from a girl; k-closing is short for kiss-closing; and f-closing, officially, is short for full-closing. But the “f” stands for that other word as well.

•

The pickup juggernaut has been rolling on vigorously since the publication of The Game. Mystery finally came out with his vh1 television show, The Pickup Artist, and published his own book, The Mystery Method: success that would seem deserved, considering what he has done for the industry. The story of Erik von Markovik’s metamorphosis into Mystery is astounding. For seven years (sometimes it is ten), he went to bars and clubs and slowly honed his method into what it is today. Every part of the method received fine tuning as necessary: if women were losing interest, say, because he waited too long to move from the final stage of the “attraction phase” to the opening stage of the “comfort phase,” he would shave off a few minutes or a few stories, then try again with the new settings for a couple of months. For years he endured rejection after rejection, eventually enjoyed successes, then systematized his results and unleashed them on the world. To this day, every pickup artist, master pickup artist and would-be pickup artist is sarging the clubs using his techniques, and boasting about it using his vocabulary. Mystery has something in common with other men of genius in that he does not always seem aware of his true calling; like Franz Liszt angling for the priesthood, he has always insisted that he is a magician, and has always had a David Copperfield-like fame as his ultimate career goal. But make no mistake about it, he is a marvel of charisma and a demon of charm. A popular YouTube clip shows Mystery in a series of “sets” in various bars and clubs. In one, he interrupts a woman with a long, drawn-out “aaaaaand … back to me,” then fills the shocked silence with a story of his own. The three women in the group are indeed stunned, but smiling, and far from objecting; they are in the presence of some kind of greatness, even if it is not clear exactly what kind. Mystery’s pseudo-intellectual rants can irk, to be sure, but his antics make up for it. When Neil Strauss is invited by two women to their hotel room in the early stages of The Game, he goes to Mystery for advice. Go over to the hotel, he tells him, and as soon as you arrive run a bath, then take off your clothes and get in. The crowning detail? Mystery prefaces this advice with: “Just do what I always do.”

Mystery handed over the reins of his website to his partner Nick Savoy (a.k.a. Savoy) in 2007; mysterymethod.com now redirects to lovesystems.com, a slickly designed operation that advertises $1,500 “workshops” and $3,000 “bootcamps” on its front page. The men at Love Systems have an ambivalent relationship to the outside world that is shared by much of the pickup community. On the one hand, true to their theorizing, they are brash and unapologetic in the way they talk about women and sex; on the other they recognize the need for some measure of restraint and a presentable public face. In this latter regard Love Systems has certainly been trying: in addition to the boot-camp announcements, their front page features their various media appearances prominently, media appearances in which they generally behave themselves like gentlemen. In April of 2008 Nick Savoy and Scott “The Don” made their case on Dr. Phil, and were well-received, largely. Dr. Phil, for his part, supported their endeavors, comparing the approach techniques to a woman’s toilette or her pushup bra. (He did say “full close” once—but sadly the viewer cannot see the reaction from Savoy and The Don.) Dr. Phil’s producers devised an experiment, sending two women to a bar in which a handful of Love Systems trainees were operating. The women, approached presumably along with others, were then brought on the show to give their feedback. Valerie and Holli said a number of things—they liked hearing stories, they didn’t like that the men neglected to talk about themselves—but the highlight is clearly the demeanor of Savoy and The Don. These are men who live and breathe the difference between what a woman says and what she really thinks. And indeed, these men also live and breathe the difference between what they themselves say and think. To see them in the audience, giving encouraging responses to the women, smiling at Dr. Phil’s jokes, applauding as the camera pans through the crowd during the closing credits—these are delicious moments for one who is in the know.

•

When The Game was released in 2005, the majority of the newspaper reviews dismissed it out of hand. The reviewers were intrigued by the phenomenon, and in many cases even joined Strauss for a night on the town. But their elbows did plenty of work, nudging the reader, who of course was on the same side of the joke as the reviewer: both reader and reviewer knew that these men were not worth taking seriously. And even if they were taken seriously, they were kept far, far away from the reviewer’s own world. One very perceptive writer, who saw first hand the frighteningly easy success of the techniques, closed his review with an awkward joke. Strauss assured him that if he met the journalist’s girlfriend he’d be sure to tell her that he behaved like a good boy. The journalist responded: “You are never, ever meeting my girlfriend.”

But are the pickup artists really all that far away from our world? Consider for example thepua principle of “abundance.” The pickup artist never gets hung up on a particular woman—this would be “one-itis,” which almost always leads to rejection; women can smell the desperation and instinctively avoid a pained lover. Instead, the pickup artist operates in abundance as a “frame of mind,” in an almost Zen-like state of simultaneous avowal and denial. Women want men who don’t need them; this is as sure a sign as any that the men are worth something, higher up in the hierarchy than they are. And so the pickup artist keeps as many leads and partners going as he can, in a sense never desiring any one of them, but in another sense desiring them all. But even among non-PUAs these principles apply: everyone knows that it is more difficult for a man to find a girlfriend when he is in a “dry spell”; and, like it or not, women of all shapes and sizes find men more attractive when they know that other women find them attractive. The pickup artist’s practice is only a hyperbolic exploitation of these principles. And even if this practice can still be criticized, precisely because it is hyperbole, there are many cases in which the pickup artists end up on top plain and simple: pursuing the same ends as the rest of us, just doing it better. When two people have met each other and enjoyed each other’s company, when should they call each other again? What should their emails and text messages say? Should they go to dinner? Try to run into each other? The pickup artist knows the answers to these questions, knows how to act in each of these situations in a way that is more elegant, more confident, and more advanced than the ways we act—in a way that is, simply put, more effective.

Strauss cautions as well against the assumption that the pickup artist’s craft will only beguile the less intelligent. If anything, he says, intelligence brings with it greater imagination, and therefore greater enjoyment of the pickup artist’s talking points: thinking about psychology is more fun for those who are better at thinking about psychology. (And if the “routines” the pickup artist “runs” still seem a bit silly, one could easily imagine a souped-up version of the Game, a Mystery Method for women with intellectual interests.) And what about “classiness,” a good upbringing? When Strauss and Mystery travel to Belgrade to visit Strauss’s childhood friend Marko—and to sarge some women, of course—they meet Marko’s Serbian one-itis, Goca. Marko wants to marry her, and is careful to do everything “right”: he buys her flowers, takes her on dates, holds open the car door for her. But Strauss attracts her despite himself, and one night she slides into bed next to him. Marko is “sweet, but just a friend,” she tells him, as she sucks his lip into her mouth. Strauss does eventually extract his lip, and himself, from the situation, but the lesson remains; it is a passage that will rankle every skeptical reader of The Game, because we have all had a Goca, and it turns out that she is a woman like any other. Pop-science classics like Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene are standard reading for the pickup artists; and all the evolutionary theory that serves their purposes makes its way into their discourse. Women are women just as much as men are men (or more so, if that is possible): they respond to cues unconsciously, whether they want to or not. They respond with their hearts, their minds, and—as is frequently intimated, more or less darkly—with their genitals. That one is the dagger.

If the pickup artists have often been dismissed for being tacky—for lack of a better word—the deeper critique has always been a moral one. Accusations of rape have come from a few voices in the feminist front, but for the most part there is agreement that the business of the pickup artists is to some degree disrespectful and exploitative. Even if much of the pualanguage can be explained away by their boys-will-be-boys mentality, indulged with a smile as their hands are caught in the cookie jar, some of it seems to bring misogyny to new, absurd heights. For example, in a section of his book entitled “Punishment/Reward,” Mystery explicitly compares conversation with a female human being to the training of a dog:

The solution dog trainers have formulated is this proven procedure: After the correction for bad behavior, structure a challenge for the dog to do something correctly. Right after you shake the jar [of pennies, to punish the dog], say, “Sit,” and help the dog sit. Then reward it with love and affection: “Good girl!!!” “Yes, good boy!” … Humans are the same way. … [W]hen we correct a woman’s misbehavior, we must then immediately structure an opportunity for her to jump through an easy hoop, thereby rewarding her for it.

The pickup artists, however, would and do defend their theory and its rhetoric—and possibly even a passage like this one—by emphasizing once again that profound gap between what women say they want and what they really want. Talk is cheap, or at most an aphrodisiac; at the end of the day, all that matters is who is sliding into your bed.

On another score, the pickup artists even come out ahead in the moral reckoning. Up front as they are about their intentions (seen but not heard, of course), they do not operate as so many non-PUAs do, lulling a woman, perhaps a social inferior, into the expectation of commitment—only to discard her after some suitable number of weeks with the usual breakup song and dance. The pickup artists are playing a game, the game that lends Strauss’s book its title, and according to them women are playing it also. They are all partners in the same enterprise. If the pickup artists are getting all of the sex, it’s simply because they are better at playing: they have trained at home and practiced in the field, and now are reaping the rewards. True, occasionally the game claims a victim, normally a player who, alas, didn’t know she was in a game and fell in love accidentally. But this is a lesser evil than that other, systematic deception, and so the pickup artists can say with a (relatively) clean conscience: all is fair in love and war.

But even if one accepts all of the pua rebuttals, even if one is allured again and again by the very real possibility of all the perfume, slender waists and blowjobs one can shake a stick at—even then there is the creeping feeling that something isn’t quite right here, that something must be wrong, that something is missing. And what is missing is: love. Despite the puacoarseness in this matter—their recasting of love as mere one-itis—love has a chance in this battle because it can appeal to the pickup artists’ own interests. Arguments that turn on fairness or altruism just aren’t going to cut it here, and so, taking a page from Plato’s Republic, we are better off looking into the souls of the pickup artists themselves. Indeed, the best commentators on the phenomenon—Wesley Yang in n+1, for example—have always pointed in this direction, as has every internet spectator who has ever complained vaguely of “shallowness.” And to be fair, Strauss himself levels this same accusation in The Game: by the end of his book he has performed an about-face so complete that we might accuse him of stacking the deck by playing up the debauchery of the book’s earlier pages. He falls in love with Lisa, a bandmate of his new friend Courtney Love, and the experience poisons him against his former pastime. While Mystery descends into a world of insanity, infidelity and bickering, “broken on the inside” as all pickup artists have come to seem, Strauss recognizes that “to win the game is to leave it” and proceeds to do just that, embracing his new monogamy. And, by the way: Marko eventually gets his Goca.

But what does this celebrated romantic bliss really look like? It is, sadly, a little disappointing. In Strauss’s hands, love becomes merely the opposite of whatever the pickup artists are doing: so, for example, he spends every day with Lisa instead of making her wait to hear from him, as a true pickup artist would in his ltr (long-term relationship) management. In fact, despite the admittedly genuine affinity between the two of them, Lisa’s primary value for Strauss seems to lie in her impermeability to the wiles of pickup technique. But, details aside, it really doesn’t matter what amount of abandon Strauss can muster to tell his love story; that story will always look tepid beside the novelty, incisiveness and sleekness of the pickup-artist narrative. It’s just too overwhelming. Other responses to the pickup artists on behalf of love are not much help either, amounting at most to an unreflective gesture of pity for the pickup artists’ wasted lives. The trouble with all of this is that the failure to provide a thorough defense of “our” values—not just an explication of them, but a rhetorically effective affirmationof them—leaves the way clear for the pickup artists to triumph. We need to make sure that love can stand a chance against the bounty promised by pua technology; that love can genuinely quell our anxieties about manliness.

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It may be true that the world has changed—our pickup artist literature and our reality dating shows announce a brave new one, at least when it comes to interaction between the sexes (or within them, for that matter). But one element of the old world, the ideal of romantic love, survives in quite a few forms in our popular, bourgeois culture. Not least among these is of course the Hollywood film; the experience of a heart warmed despite itself in a darkened theater is as good a reminder as any that love still has a place in our twenty-first-century jumble of values. But love in Hollywood, even if it exceeds in scope and exuberance the reflections on love by Neil Strauss and the pickup-bloggers, is nevertheless only a remnant, a leftover from a discourse even more exuberant. To meditate on popular film and other contemporary manifestations of the love-ideal, even if informative in its own right, would be to miss an opportunity to cut out the middleman and return to the source. The best expressions of love, it turns out, came to pass long before our time.

The Western obsession with passionate love is generally acknowledged to have its roots in the phenomenon of “courtly love,” that rare and highly mannered practice of twelfth-century French nobility. Known to us today through the poetry of the troubadours and explored in the complex Roman de la Rose, the typical case involved the chaste pursuit of an unattainable woman of the court by a knight or lesser nobleman—a spiritualized endeavor that had little or nothing to do with sex. A second, modern, bloom begins with the great pre-Romantic theorist of love, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who maintains this tradition of spiritualization and indeed intensifies it, attempting to bind romantic love to marriage, and—perhaps thereby—putting love on a pedestal higher than any it had ever before occupied. His epistolary novel Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, though largely forgotten today, was one of the most-read books of the entire eighteenth century; it exercised a commanding influence not only over Rousseau’s properly Romantic successors but also over any number of the great novelists of the nineteenth century: Austen, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and so on. But among all these descendants of Rousseau, the one best suited to our purposes is undoubtedly the Frenchman Marie-Henri Beyle—an author better known by his pseudonym: Stendhal.

Though his reputation today rests on his novels The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma, Stendhal was also a prolific writer of essays, novellas, biographies (of Mozart and Rossini, among others), travel literature, literary criticism (including the influential Racine et Shakespeare), and, perhaps most important next to his novels, autobiography. He is often noted for his early introduction of realism in the development of the novel, or his general psychological acuteness in the depiction of his characters, both of which accomplishments are indeed impressive—but just as impressive or more is what he has to say about love. To an attempted debunker of love, Stendhal is a terror. Secure in his conviction that passionate love is the only worthwhile activity for man, he is nevertheless deeply versed in the theories and convictions of the other side; it would seem, then, that he has chosen his allegiances for good reason. He is one of love’s great theorists, and one of its most vivid painters.

As a sample, consider the romance of Fabrizio del Dongo and Clélia Conti in The Charterhouse of Parma, Stendhal’s hymn to his beloved Italy, published in 1839, just three years before his death. Fabrizio, a young Lombard aristocrat, is the book’s ambiguously heroic hero. As the story opens, he leaves his family to join Napoleon in the republican cause; he bumbles his way through Waterloo, wandering among the fields, buying horses and having them stolen, and eventually convalescing in an inn, partly from wounds suffered in a fight with fellow soldiers. This is hardly an auspicious beginning for a romantic lead, and it is never quite clear (and not in a particularly interesting way) whether Stendhal is parodying Fabrizio or not—this just one of the many infelicities the novel is so often criticized for, criticism made easier by the knowledge that it was written—dictated—by an infirm Stendhal in less than two months. But Fabrizio does redeem himself, and in a deeply Stendhalian way. Thrown in prison for an alleged murder that was in fact a very brave act of self-defense, he manages to land squarely in his life’s fundamental adventure: he falls in love. As he is being carried off to his cell, Fabrizio catches sight of Clélia Conti, who it turns out is the daughter of General Fabio Conti, the Minister of Police in Parma and therefore the Governor of the prison. Clélia’s face is a familiar one, however; seven years before, when Fabrizio was 16 and Clélia was just 12, the two met on the road from Lake Como to Milan. In a police mix-up, Clélia and her father had been pursued from the lake; since they now needed to go with the police to Milan, but were on foot, Fabrizio’s family offered to take Clélia in their carriage, saving her from an unpleasantly dusty walk. In a moment of confusion, while stepping on the footboard to climb into the carriage, Clélia accidentally fell into Fabrizio’s arms. Fabrizio thought to himself: “What a fellow-prisoner she would make … She would know how to love.” Later, in the carriage, they blushed with every glance.

This history is still fresh in the minds of the two when they meet again at the prison; when Fabrizio sees Clélia, he takes the opportunity to remind her of their common past, but she is stricken, unable to speak. Soon enough we discover that she didn’t need to speak, because her eyes have done all the work for her—Fabrizio is climbing the stairs to his prison in the sky, not yet even in his cell, when he discovers that the look of authentic, impassioned pity from her face has erased all the despair he might have felt at being imprisoned. He now cares only about seeing her again, and soon enough is given the opportunity. In one of the more charming inventions to have come from Stendhal’s spatial imagination (his autobiographical writings are filled with hand-drawn maps of houses and streets), Fabrizio’s cell is located in a tower that is itself placed on top of another tower: the tower-above-the-tower has its base 180 feet in the air. Arriving in his new home, Fabrizio discovers that he can see very clearly all the way to the Alps, almost a hundred miles away. But he can also see Clélia. Just as fantastical as a tower sitting on the roof of a tower (and just as fun), there is also a residence, sitting on the same tower: the General’s palazzo, in which his daughter is visible for a brief period of every day, tending to her birds. The two lovers begin an intricate visual courtship, with carefully rationed looks from Clélia and inventive attempts at communication from Fabrizio. When wooden blinds are installed in the cell to block the prisoner’s view of the Alps (and to destroy his morale), Fabrizio first bores a hole through them, inserting a wire to give Clélia a sign of his presence; then he cuts out an entire hand-sized chunk of the blind and pokes his face through. Later he writes letters on his palm with a piece of charcoal.

Details are laid upon details—the inner lives of the two characters are artfully wrapped around their physical circumstances. Clélia is convinced that Fabrizio is in love with his aunt, the duchess; Fabrizio is ignorant of the various rumors of his impending execution, and cannot understand the resulting fluctuations in Clélia’s mood; they grasp at the meaning of each other’s gestures, filling in the gaps with their own imaginations. Through it all, Stendhal convinces us that this love is of the utmost seriousness for both of its participants. When Fabrizio first removes the section of the blind that he has cut away and shows his face to Clélia, she trembles so much that she spills the water intended for her plants; and Stendhal tells us, matter-of-factly: “This moment was incomparably the finest in Fabrizio’s life.” Fabrizio, until this point in the narrative the master of every heart he encountered, “was all too aware that the eternal happiness of his life would oblige him to reckon with the Governor’s daughter, and that it was within her power to make him the most wretched of men.” It is sentiments like these that Stendhal claimed to find in the hearts of real Italians, and it is sentiments like these that help redeem Fabrizio. As Balzac puts it in a famous 1840 review, Stendhal, in order to uphold Fabrizio as his hero, “was under an obligation … to endow him with a feeling which would make him superior to the men of genius who surround him.” Fabrizio does not need genius: “Feeling, in short, is equivalent to talent.”

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The greatest statement of Stendhal’s ideas on love is his much earlier work, the 1822 On Love. Part fiction, part philosophy, part memoir, part collection of aphorisms, it is a book impossible to categorize. To go along with the eccentricity of its structure, the status of its authorship is ludicrously difficult to figure out: Stendhal treats the book as his own work in his many prefaces, then disowns it in a footnote to the very first section, attributing it to the recently deceased Italian Lisio Visconti—who is later, inexplicably, referred to in the third person in the text itself. At another point Stendhal uses the word “I,” then adds a footnote (presumably in some later edition) begging the reader to forgive the mistake. But even if the book can seem a bit of a free-for-all, it is packed with gems. For instance, in the chapter “Concerning Glances”: “Glances are the big guns of the virtuous coquette; everything can be conveyed in a look, and yet that look can always be denied, because it cannot be quoted word for word.” Or the brilliant advice on curing love (if it can be done at all, that is): “The healing friend must always be on hand to keep commenting as much as possible on the events which have taken place in the love affair, and to ensure that these reflections are long, wearisome, and pointless, so that they begin to sound like commonplace.” And the more radical option: “The unkind woman may be accused of some embarrassing physical defect which it is impossible to verify; if the calumny could be verified and found true it would very soon be disposed of by the imagination, and forgotten. It is only imagination that can resist imagination…”

Yet the book participates in Stendhal’s mission all the same: it is a celebration of passionate love. This is announced in the prefaces, where Stendhal warns that any reader who has never experienced the “foolishness” of love, or who is concerned only with money or scholarship, should throw the book away immediately. And in Stendhal’s famous quadripartite categorization of different kinds of love, passionate love comes out on top; it is the original of which the other three are pale shadows: physical love, “mannered love” and “vanity-love.” The essence of passionate love, what grants it the nobility that the others do not possess, is what Stendhal callscrystallization. Just as the naked branch of a tree will gather diamond-like crystals if it is dropped into a salt mine, a lover will gather perfections about the crooked timber of his beloved. Needless to say, the concept is familiar to us—consider Freud’s “overvaluation of the love object,” or the general psychoanalytic category of “idealization.” It is Stendhal, however, who spins it out into a rich texture of observation and insight, an achievement with few equals in the history of writing on love.

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And Stendhal knows the pickup artist already, in 1822. Not our pickup artist, but a figure very similar to him. There had always been pickup “theory” of some kind or other, such as Ovid’s frank advice on meeting women at the theater, or Jean de Meun’s completion of the Roman de la Rose—nothing approaching today’s pickup artists in efficiency and attention to detail, but enough to form a tradition of sorts. And in Stendhal’s time as in our own, the seducer was an acknowledged character type: the nearest literary model for Stendhal was the Vicomte de Valmont, in Laclos’ Liaisons dangereuses; the nearest personal model Stendhal’s own uncle, Romain Gagnon, a ladies’ man who was something of a big fish in the small pond of Grenoble. But Stendhal not only knows the pickup artist, he also keeps him close, even defining himself in relation to him. In one of the first sections Stendhal wrote for On Love, the chapter “Werther and Don Juan,” he introduces Don Juan, remarkably, as follows: “Allow me to sketch the portrait of my most intimate friend.” That portrait is given alongside Werther’s, and Stendhal presents it in all fairness. He admits that Don Juan possesses genuine virtues: fearlessness, resourcefulness, poise, wit—all of which allow him to avoid the many embarrassments his counterpart will inevitably endure. His very real brilliance even prevents Stendhal from deciding in Werther’s favor. In fact, by the end of the chapter Stendhal declares a relativist-style toss-up: “But after all, if he takes the trouble to examine his own mind, each man has his beau idéal, and it always seems to me a little absurd to try to convert one’s neighbor.” That may be so, but there is no secret about how Stendhal feels, and whether he wants to or not (he wants to), he delivers a well-nigh fatal blow. Don Juan, it turns out, has spent his life in a special kind of ignorance. The lover knows something of the experiences of Don Juan, but the opposite cannot be said:

From the point of view of the Don Juan passionate love may be compared to a strange road, steep and difficult, which at first, it is true, leads through delightful groves, but soon loses itself among jagged rocks not the least attractive to ordinary eyes. Gradually the road climbs among high mountains and through a dark forest whose huge trees shut out the light with their thick towering foliage, bringing terror to the hearts of those unaccustomed to danger.

After many painful and humiliating wanderings as if through an endless, tortuous labyrinth, suddenly one turns a further corner and comes upon a new world, Lalla-Rookh’s wonderful valley in Kashmir.

How can the Don Juans, who never set out along this road, or at most take only a few steps along it, how can they have any idea of the view at journey’s end?

The great mistake of the pickup artists, of Don Juans, of seducers in general, is to think that the lover is a failed version of themselves. The lover, they say, tries to “get the girl,” but just doesn’t know how—and if he learned their techniques he would. The trouble is that there is no agreement on just what this “getting” is. And, in fact, if the lover were to adopt the techniques of the pickup artists, his “getting” would become impossible. For a woman’s sexual surrender does not count as “getting” for the lover. Nor, for that matter, does her love, if the lover does not love her also. The lover’s “getting” requires his own experience: his own adventure, his road through the mountains and forests. And the reward in the valley is not sexual satisfaction; it is a proof of love. The greatest moment in Fabrizio del Dongo’s life is not a conquest, sexual or military. It is the sight of the woman he loves, shaking before his eyes.

For Stendhal, love ennobles because it makes all else beautiful; both nature and art take on a new glow when one is in love, in part because one sees the beloved in every sunset, every painting. Because she has been made perfect in the process of crystallization, all that is beautiful in the world becomes part of her, a larger her, spread out over the world—naturally, then, anything beautiful will remind one of her. Love is reverie, it is akin to the artistic process. And akin to the artistic product as well: if music were always perfect, Stendhal tells us, we would never need to fall in love. Then again, he admitted almost in the same breath, perfect music only ever deepened his intoxication with his beloved.

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And yet in all of this there is a note of desperation. Or more than a note—a theme of sadness in love that at times overwhelms its exaltation, and always at least threatens to do so. There are passages in On Love where Stendhal seems to equate unrequited love with love in general, as if this were its purest form: consider the choice of Werther as the antipode to Don Juan, for example. The book is filled with discussions of jealousy and attempts to get over despair which show the dark side of love, the brutal suffering that we necessarily risk when we make a real go of it. And in Stendhal’s reports from the early nineteenth-century aristocratic social scene of Europe’s great cities, there are so many suicides that one wonders if there was anyone left standing by the time the book went to press. Is Stendhal just being true to his phenomenon, or is there something more going on?

There is in fact something more, for On Love was a brave but failed attempt by its author to overcome an oppressive passion. Stendhal would never fully recover from his one great love, Métilde, the woman whose image, even after her death, would appear to him persistently as “a tender, profoundly sad phantom.” It all began with Stendhal’s arrival in Milan in 1814. Fresh from his rather extraordinary brush with history—he was present at Napoleon’s retreat from Russia—he found his way to the city that had already captured his soul, having resolved to live there on his veteran’s half-pay and the small annuity left to him by his grandfather. (Restoration France was not so hospitable to Bonapartists, Stendhal correctly surmised.) At the outset of this period of cultural tourism Stendhal took up again with the woman who was something like the Rosaline to his Juliet, Angela Pietragrua, who had previously been happy enough to entertain him on his visits to Italy, but now began to chafe under his new semi-permanent residence. Their eventual break features as its highlight a story that may or may not be apocryphal, but in either case resembles the drama, maybe even the histrionics, that would find its way into Stendhal’s novels: having gained the confidence of one of Pietragrua’s maids, Stendhal was informed that his beloved had taken other lovers besides him. To confirm, he arranged with the maid to hide himself in a closet—from which vantage point he then observed an entire rendez-vous, not three feet away. He was initially amused, apparently, then deeply depressed. Small potatoes, however; the deepest depression was yet to come.

Stendhal met Matilde Viscontini Dembowski, the wife of a Polish general, in early 1818, and promptly fell in love with her. Métilde (the French form of her name, the one used by Stendhal) was an intelligent and resolute woman, the type Stendhal had been waiting for. The two once conversed, memorably to him, of “Dante, love, Saint-Preux, and the letters of the Portuguese nun.” And Métilde was a freedom fighter, associated with the Carbonari, the revolutionary group working to expel the Austrians from Italy: she had even successfully endured an interrogation by Metternich’s police—surely for Stendhal a woman could not get any stronger than that. His love for Métilde went to farcical, touching extremes. He once followed her from Milan to Volterra—a journey of about 200 miles—where she was visiting her children. Snooping around in his “disguise,” a new jacket and a pair of green glasses, Stendhal was nevertheless discovered, rebuked, and punished: from that point forward he was not allowed to pay visits to Métilde in Milan more than once a fortnight. Stendhal’s entire being then became dependent on whatever mood Métilde happened to have during his visit; each two week period of his life was shaped by the few hours with her that preceded it. (The incident is narrated in On Love—with the names changed, of course.) Métilde, for her part, wanted nothing to do with Stendhal, other than to harvest some of his flattery, perhaps. Mostly she took pains not to allow any rumors to be generated. For Métilde was a previously fallen woman: fleeing her abusive husband, she was known to have associated with the liberal poet Ugo Foscolo during her stay in Switzerland. The affair was no affair at all, in fact only a friendship, but her departure from her marital home made conditions ripe for scandal (an affair under “normal” conditions would probably have been overlooked). And so Métilde avoided Stendhal in part because of his libertine reputation—which was most likely alternately a wound and a consolation for him. His letters tell the real story, however, and it is mostly a story of wounds. In one of them he writes: “There are moments during the long lonely evenings when, if it were necessary to murder in order to see you, I would become a murderer.” After he had returned to France—expelled from Italy, more or less, because of his friendships with Carbonari, and questionable passages in his writings—he briefly considered assassinating Louis xviii.

Stendhal founded his theory of love on imagination. That especially human faculty was for him the source of all that is valuable in love: he thought that without it we would be mere animals, or mere savages, and—in his more extreme but also perhaps more lucid moments—he also thought amorous possession could itself be an evil, since it did away with the unique pleasures of the imagination. How can we “crystallize” perfection once we have become familiar with imperfection? Of course, in light of the abject desperation Stendhal suffered at the feet of Métilde Dembowski, all of this appears a bit suspicious. There is authenticity in loving when that love is not requited; to stick to one’s guns in this way is to stay true to one’s own desires, a possibility closed off to a seducer. But although this pain might be praiseworthy, although one might decide that living life without the pain just wouldn’t be worthwhile—even then, surely, we can still say that requited love would be better. The lover, even the perversely Stendhalian lover, would have to admit this. If he didn’t, there would be something disturbingly paradoxical, possibly soul-destroying, about the whole thing. Why spend all that time loving if one doesn’t actually want what one claims to want?

But once we accept this much, there is no very big step to the next question: What exactly can we do to get what we want? In a sense, both Fabrizio del Dongo and Stendhal did as much as they could. Fabrizio presses his suit with all the urgency available to him, trying the limits imposed by his jail cell; and Stendhal, in addition to writing impassioned letters, becomes his beloved’s unwitting travel partner. But in another sense Fabrizio and Stendhal are doing nothing: each is merely subjecting himself with greater and greater intensity to the will of his beloved—and then hoping for the best. Fabrizio is successful and Stendhal is unsuccessful, probably because Fabrizio is a handsome nobleman and Stendhal is not. From the seducer’s perspective, however, this is just dumb luck, and we can certainly imagine a situation in which Fabrizio would be unsuccessful (consider, for example, that during all of his persistence Clélia thought that he was his aunt’s lover). Is subjection then the only option?—a subjection that risks the slide into a possibly years-long misery like Stendhal’s? Can we not do something? Can we not somehow change our behavior, even our being—but stop short of full-blown seduction? Or, put another way: Can we become better at love without becoming pickup artists?

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Stendhal has one more story to tell us. It is an unsettling story, from the unsettling life of Julien Sorel, the protagonist of Stendhal’s masterpiece, The Red and the Black. One of the great characters in the history of Western literature, Sorel is full of complex and varied motivations, capable of crippling timidity, but also lofty and incomprehensible deeds. He begins the novel as a humble carpenter’s son and ends up a celebrity of sorts, capturing the imagination of all of France. Born in Verrières, “one of the prettiest towns in all Franche-Comté,” he manages to find an escape for his sensitive soul from the horrors of his brutal, petit-bourgeois family: he becomes tutor to the children of the town’s mayor, thanks to his superb knowledge of Latin and his freakishly powerful memory. There he meets his first love, the lady of the household, Madame de Rênal. The affair proceeds in fits and starts, clumsy beginnings and, indeed, endings; most importantly, it is a first love for both of the parties involved, despite Madame de Rênal’s marriage and children, and despite the Napoleon-obsessed Julien’s attempts to view the affair as a strategic victory on his part. After some time the two eventually achieve a real purity of feeling, which persists, both in Julien’s mind and in the mind of the reader, as a counterweight to what happens in the second half of the novel.

After a detour at a seminary in Besançon—the book’s title refers to the red of the military and the black of the clergy, the life Julien would have wanted and the one he was forced to accept, respectively—the setting shifts to Paris. There Sorel accepts a position as secretary to the influential Marquis de la Mole, a man who seems to have dedicated his life to changing his title from Marquis to Duke, but who is nevertheless an exemplar of the oldest, most established nobility of France, the legitimate cream of the crop. In his house in the Faubourg Saint-Germain there will play out a love affair described by Stendhal with such force that a reader cannot but wince in recognition. For the Marquis has a daughter, Mathilde (this is surely not a coincidence, even with the slight difference in spelling), and she is as beautiful and intimidating as they come: a perfect “10,” her value compounded by her stratospheric social status; the most desirable woman in the most desirable neighborhood, the prom queen for all of Europe. Julien intrigues her with his intellectual’s arrogance, so refreshing beside the flattery of her insipid circle of admiring half-men, a group of young nobles who quake at the thought of liberalism’s return (the story is set just before the events of 1830, which loom over the novel just as World War I does over Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain). Mathilde wants a man of action, a man who recalls the times of Richard iii, and finds him, oddly, in Julien. The two begin to exchange letters, which is surely a tribute to Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse, since Julien and Mathilde have the leisure and the privacy to speak to each other whenever they want. Soon there are suspicions on Julien’s part—it is a woman who also takes down his model, Molière’s Tartuffe—but he agrees to an assignation. One does in fact occur, and then another, but eventually, sure of being loved, Mathilde loses interest, and Julien is cast into a misery he had not previously known to be possible. In a passage uncomfortably chilling to anyone who has even once experienced the rejection of a fickle lover, Stendhal describes a decisive moment in their affair:

After this terrible blow, frantic with love and misery, Julien attempted to argue himself back into favor. Nothing could have been more absurd. Argue yourself out of being disliked? But reason no longer had any control over his actions. Blind instinct compelled him to delay this final determination of his fate. He felt that, while he was still talking, it would not be all over. Mathilde did not listen to him; the sound of his words irritated her. She could not have believed he’d have the audacity to interrupt her.

Mercifully, Julien is distracted from his suffering by a top-secret diplomatic mission in the service of the Marquis, which after some adventures carries him to Strasbourg. There he runs into an acquaintance of his, a Russian, Prince Korasoff—and not a moment too soon. Julien thirsts to share his story with someone, and he could not have found a better interlocutor. Korasoff, delighted that a Frenchman is actually listening to him, proceeds to advise Julien on the proper way to regain Mathilde’s heart, surprised all along that Julien could be so naïve (apparently all Russian gentry were pickup artists at the time). The heart of Korasoff’s counsel is the recommendation that Julien actively pursue some other woman in the extended social circle of the de la Mole family, a plan he helps realize with a very special gift: a series of 53 letters. Julien is to copy the letters out and send them to the new target—an assault on propriety beginning with highfalutin trivialities but gradually incorporating riskier intimacies. Having taken a real liking to his new friend, Korasoff even offers Julien a cousin’s hand in marriage; Julien refuses the offer, and takes the advice instead.

The experiment, then, is set to go. It is clear on the one hand that Julien is not a pickup artist, or not merely one: he is deeply in love, wracked with one-itis, with his aim firmly in sight. But on the other hand he is not leaving matters in Mathilde’s hands: he is playing the game he is forced to play. Can we not excuse him because he loves her? Is this not the solution we have been seeking all along? Has Julien not become a synthesis of sorts, both a lover and also an “artist”—a passionate man who tames his passion for the right end?

Come what may, Julien does not falter. He returns to Paris, and to Mathilde’s surprise he does not beg, and he does not plead—he just goes about his business seducing the pious Madame de Fervaques. This includes a strategy session with a previous suitor and an exiled Spanish count; and regular, extraordinarily insincere, conversation with the new object of his affection in the drawing room of the de la Mole mansion. Julien fulfills his duty, but wearily, not bothering to open many of Madame de Fervaques’ letters to him, and even forgetting to change the names in one of Prince Korasoff’s letters when copying it into his own hand. His strategy is successful nevertheless: on one occasion, receiving an envelope from Madame de Fervaques’ porter, he is observed by Mathilde. She guesses correctly the source of the communication, loses her composure and cries out to him. Julien, stunned, almost yields to her as she throws herself in his arms. But the warnings of Korasoff remain with him in his time of need; he knows that if he just once reveals his true feelings he will be despised, and so he spurns her, coolly and diplomatically. The charade is kept up in the weeks to come, even as the two resume their former intimacy: Mathilde is finally in love and could not be happier; Julien is also in love, but his eyes only show it when hidden. Absurdly, the state of affairs is maintained all the way up to Mathilde’s pregnancy.

Julien does finally confess his love to Mathilde, but at that point the game is over; he is her master, and she is his slave. No matter what the outcome, however, what remains with us is the disjunction between the two lovers, the sense that they are like two people taking part in two completely different conversations, even though their words are directed at each other. The experiment, then, ends in a disquieting paradox: Julien can only have the woman he loves if he does not, for all intents and purposes, love the woman he loves. He has tried to become simultaneously lover and pickup artist, but his failure makes him, when all is said and done, only a pickup artist. He “gets” the girl in the one way—but not the other.

Stendhal is not known for his flowery prose. It is true that the plumbing of psychological depth in Red and the Black affords more occasions for this sort of thing than the spare, show-don’t-tell realism of Charterhouse; but we could nevertheless describe Stendhal’s style in Red and the Black with words like “breezy” or “brisk.” Yet it is hard to imagine a more moving evocation of Julien Sorel’s dilemma than the one Stendhal gives us, as the young man feigns love for Mathilde’s rival, Madame de Fervaques. Unable to show his passion for Mathilde, but overwhelmed by that passion all the same, he is caught:

“Ah,” he said to himself, hearing the empty words his mouth had pronounced, as if he had been emitting strange noises, “if I could cover those pale cheeks with kisses, and you never felt them!”

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If it is impossible to combine the two extremes, lover and pickup artist, we might do better trying to find some ground between them. This is easier said than done, certainly, or easier sketched than filled out—but at least we can expect some help from Stendhal, even if that help will be a little difficult to locate. Stendhal, as we have seen, is something of a double agent, even if his allegiances ultimately lie on the side of the lovers. But just as he knows the shortcomings of Don Juan, Stendhal also knows the shortcomings of Werther. Julien Sorel is a response to this painful knowledge, an attempt in fictional form to overcome this separation. This attempt may fail, but there are others in Stendhal’s oeuvre.

It is a commonplace in the reception of On Love to call attention to Stendhal’s uniquely binary, or ambivalent, approach to his subject matter: he seems to be both fully absorbed in the phenomenon of love and also a detached observer of it; both “emotional” and “analytic.” Often in the making of the observation it is the trivial aspects that are emphasized—that Stendhal excelled in mathematics as a young man, that he is fond of categorizing, etc.—but the core is deep: Stendhal has somehow, someway, succeeded in being both part of something larger, swept away by it, and so to speak controlled by it; and also larger than the same thing, sweeping it up, controlling it. In a handful of places in the book, this intriguing authorial strategy finds itself reflected in Stendhal’s advice about love. These moments are the book’s real treasures.

The best among them may be the curious chapter of On Love entitled “Concerning Intimacy.” The chapter’s stated theme, unaffectedness, first leads to some head-scratching: Stendhal of all people is counseling transparency in the transactions of love? Has he not shown us already that this is suicide? But slowly he explains himself, and a fascinating paradox takes shape. According to Stendhal, being natural is not at all, well, natural—it is an art. It takes effort. The kind of thing he has in mind is familiar enough once he spells it out, but an extraordinary thing nonetheless: unaffectedness in conversation (or “naturalness,” in a more literal and more awkward translation of the French) is something one needs to work toward, step by step. One must set the stage carefully for the right moment to present itself; and then, when it does, one must speak from the heart. And not too late, either—there is a right time for everything. It is as if the mood between two partners in a conversation has a will of its own. The challenge is to be attuned to it. As Stendhal writes: “The whole art of loving seems to me, in a nutshell, to consist in saying precisely what the degree of intoxication requires at any given moment.”

This unnatural naturalness, this choreographed approach to the clumsiness of truth, is a perfect illustration of the synthesis we have been narrowing in on: the elaborate preparations for naturalness are an attempt to master a situation, but the moments of naturalness are themselves an act of surrender. One prepares for intoxication; but one is nevertheless intoxicated. One yields carefully; but one nevertheless yields. This precarious mixture of the active and the passive is the middle ground between a yearning, hopeless love and a ribald pickup artistry. It is love mediated through art, an artistry of love.

•

The lover should take his cue from Stendhal. The balancing act called for must be duplicated at every level and at every moment: always a genuine passion, and always a compensating restraint. If the lover is truly in love, he will be bursting to ask, bursting to tell, bursting to know and to make known. But he must always be patient, always willing to bide his time, to keep his sweet sentiments and his ardent gestures to himself until the time for them arrives. And though the beloved may waver in her affection, the lover cannot let his faith be shaken. Like Stendhal’s ideal conversation with its moments of preparation and moments of naturalness, the love affair as a whole contains moments of distance and moments of closeness; the lover must always adapt, stay ready, and roll with the punches.

Words are especially dangerous. Not only must the “I love you” be indefinitely postponed, but a whole lot else as well. The love affair should be an escape from the everyday, from the routine of the discursive; whoever does not understand the importance of what is unsaid in love does not understand love at all. When, in one of the decisive moments of The Charterhouse of Parma, Clélia Conti’s father falls ill in a near-poisoning, she realizes just how high are the stakes in her love for Fabrizio, and swears on the spot to the Virgin Mary that she will never lay eyes upon him again. Much later in the story, the ever-daring Fabrizio manufactures a ruse that lands him in the same room as Clélia, in the house where she has taken refuge. As soon as she sees through the disguise he has assumed to gain entrance to the house, she runs to the corner of the room and hides her face in her hands. But nearly immediately she gives him a hint: “It is already a great deal more than you deserve if, by some distorted and probably criminal interpretation of my vow, I consent to listen to you.” Fabrizio requires a few seconds, but eventually he understands. He snuffs out the candle. Clélia throws herself in his arms and—her vow intact, because she cannot see him—exclaims: “Dear Fabrizio, how long it has taken you to get here!” When their affair resumes, they meet in the dark, and make love in the dark. Always.

Clélia and Fabrizio show that the most earnest love can go hand in hand with the most cunning eroticism. Even if the pickup artists have developed the craft of seduction to a degree of refinement not yet seen under the sun, they still cannot claim the erotic arts for themselves. The pleasure and duty of restraint belong just as much to love as they do to mere seduction. And so the proper antidote to the poison of the pickup artists is not a staid, predictable courtship absent of vitality, followed by an equally staid and predictable relationship. The antidote is rather to have the best of both worlds, love and eroticism. In an important sense, “the game” belongs to the lover much more even than it belongs to the pickup artists, because with the lover the game is redeemed and heightened. The lover’s eroticism is always subject to a greater end, an end greater than himself: it is flirtation in the service of commitment, complication in the service of sincerity, playfulness in the service of seriousness.

But remember that love cannot simply be the seduction of someone who happens to be the lover’s beloved: that path leads to paradox and despair, as Julien Sorel was kind enough to show us. Julien’s crucial error was to separate his love from his “technique,” to use eroticism like a tool for the attainment of some unrelated end. And he paid the price: crying in his arms, Mathilde was in love with someone, to be sure—but it wasn’t really Julien. There is only one way out. The lover must combine his passion and his restraint, as much as possible, in the very same moment. In other words, it is not enough that playfulness be taken up in the service of seriousness; the seriousness must always be present alongside the playfulness, bound up with it in a constant synthesis. This means that the lover will have to show his hand every once in a while, even if he is quick to hide it again. And this also means that love will always bring with it some portion of terror. Because his heart is at stake, the lover will feel the terror of losing the beloved, even in the moment she gives herself to him. This is the terror the seducer believes he has bypassed. Maybe he has—but in doing so the chance for love has slipped through his fingers. Because he does not sow, he cannot reap. There is no way around this.

•

When I look back now on what happened with Rachel, I am still filled with regret. But my disappointment with myself is tempered by the knowledge that my greatest failure was not the failure to acquire her, but rather, odd as it seems, the failure to do justice to the erotic itself. Another way to put this is that I spoiled the chance the two of us had to create something beautiful. Not the chance I had, but the chance we had. Nobody knows how many more times we would have reveled in the details of the flirtation that brought us together, how many more albums we would have listened to on my living room floor, how many more people would have told us we looked like each other. But also—nobody knows how many times we would have trembled in fear at each other’s absence. I only regret not being prepared for all of this then.

Which is not to say that Rachel was wrong when she gave me that peculiar command, on that last night: “Be bold.” She was right; I should have been bold, and I wasn’t. But the boldness needed was not the excessive manliness of the pickup artists. It was a manliness at once more humble and more daring; it was the courage to face up to whatever is greater than us in love, and the presence of mind to spring into action when the time comes.

•

I am a passionate lover. You might be too. We might have been born that way, even. I was very, very young—prepubescent—the first time I was so captivated by a girl that I could not speak in her presence. When I was in college, I suffered a debilitating passion that frequently kept me in my darkened dorm room for an hour at a time, writhing in hope and despair. She and I once ended up trapped in a bathroom together when we were drunk at a party. She was clearly interested in making out; I wanted a declaration of love. As the knocking and complaining on the other side of the door became more and more distracting, she got fed up and left. When I told a friend how I was feeling, he said: “You mean you’re like a 12 year old girl?” I was as a matter of fact 22 at the time, and I was ashamed. I am not any longer. Stendhal turned 36 in the year that he succumbed to Métilde Dembowski, and Goethe seemed to spend an entire lifetime falling in love. These men do not have a special dispensation because they are uncommonly good at putting words next to each other; the Romantic temperament is available to the rest of us as well. If you are a passionate lover, then, know that you are not alone. And do not lament your condition.

Yet you should also know that you are one of a dying breed. True, the reach of Romanticism is long and profound—it is undeniable that we in the West are still the descendants of Stendhal. But love is fading fast. Long ago, the world provided much of our eroticism for us, by leaving us few options other than restraint. Now we no longer have Madame de Rênal’s happy home, or Fabrizio’s prison walls, to do us the favor of getting in our way. Were Stendhal to visit us today, this would no doubt be one of his first observations: love has become too easy. Or, rather, love has become too difficult, because sex has become too easy. If you take up love today, then, you take on an extra burden: the burden of creating your own eroticism, of conjuring up walls and limits out of thin air to replace the ones we have lost. You have no choice in the matter. Love was hard enough already; it has only gotten harder. Your love will exhaust you. But it will be worth the trouble.

This post originally appeared at The Point.

Quen non coñece algún lugar en Galicia con este nome? Este topónimo tan frecuente na nosa xeografía fai referencia a unha elevación do terreo. Outo, palabra arcaica que era utilizada por algúns dos autores máis sobranceiros da literatura galega, provén do latín altus, que hoxe empregamos como alto.

Daquela, Montouto vén a significar literamente “monte alto”.

1. When another girl gives you a compliment, especially when said girl has what you perceive to be excellent taste levels, and the compliment is made about something that you worked really hard on (such as a painstaking blowout).

2. When you try on something in a size smaller (either because it’s the only one left, or you’re feeling zesty) and it actually fits. Do not feel bad if this leads you to do sexy poses and/or an endzone dance in the dressing room, as both of these are perfectly appropriate reactions.

3. Getting the very last adorable sale item, which is both perfectly your size and completely unscathed by gross makeup stains from a billion girls trying it on before you.

4. Going up to the cash register and finding out that said sale item is, in fact, more discounted than you thought it was and you are paying less than what you had already mentally prepared yourself to pay.

5. When you are sexually active, and your period comes right on time.

6. When your period waits until after a big event or vacation to come. Also when it happens at a time when you are completely able to deal with it and not, say, at work, or asleep on white sheets. (No one wants to wake up to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre on the crotch area of their bedding.)

7. Having one of those multiple-hour-long phone calls or Skype sessions with a girlfriend where you catch up on everything that has happened since you last spoke, and there isn’t a moment of dead air or small talk.

8. Going out to eat with a girlfriend who is totally non-judgy and awesome about food, where you can both order whatever you want and not have to worry about putting a weird disclaimer on every thing you put in your mouth.

9. Arriving home at the end of the day and immediately removing your bra, often without taking off your shirt. (The next step is, of course, flinging the bra across the room with complete abandon and hoping it lands on a chair so you don’t have to go pick it up off the floor.)

10. Getting within a block of your apartment after a long night out in agonizing heels, and reaching that “Fuck it, hope there aren’t any hypodermic needles on this city street” moment where you just take off your shoes and let your wounded little feet walk home barefoot.

11. Finishing your second glass of white wine and feeling that perfect amount of buzzed that makes you believe you’re a bored housewife whose hobbies include smoking those weird, skinny cigarettes and fucking younger men.

12. Using a high-quality vibrator for the first time. *Raises hand and closes eyes as if in church*

13. Receiving an item of clothing or an accessory as a gift that you actually love and would have bought for yourself.

14. Being just the right amount of twisted to really appreciate hearing such things as “Turn My Swag On” by Soulja Boy, and having it come on at the bar at that exact moment.

15. Dancing in a circle with all of your girlfriends and not even caring that someone is going to make a comment about how you all look like an anthropomorphic Dane Cook joke, because fuck the haters.

16. Having the whole public bathroom to yourself when you have to do a number two, so that you don’t have to do that horrible “silent stand-off” with the woman two stalls down from you.

17. Finding a porn that actually does something for you, as opposed to the vast majority of porn, which just gives you a vague feeling of “That poor woman’s vagina, why?”

18. Getting your nails done and feeling, if even for that fleeting moment when you walk out of the salon, like you finally have your shit together and can take on the whole world with your flawless, professional nails.

19. Successfully managing a hairdo that withstands an entire day’s worth of use and doesn’t start slowly falling as the bobby pins dig into your head from every angle.

20. Finding a shampoo that repairs your split ends and doesn’t require you to spend half your paycheck every time you need a new bottle.

21. Getting a head massage while having your hair washed before a cut. Mmmm, shampoo massages. Mmmm.

22. When you are out drinking in some sort of outdoor scenario and you have to go pee and, like some kind of urinating guardian angel, another girl is like “I’ll go cover for you if you cover for me,” and then the two of you go pee together in some discreet corner.

23. Going to bed with a guy (or girl) you really like for the first time, and finding that — in addition to be this awesome, perfect person that you are so, so into — they actually know how to go down on a girl, and don’t just indiscriminately nibble on your lady bits until you fake an orgasm. This is the moment where you have a silent hi five with Jesus, and thank him for always looking out for you, even though you’re kind of a mess.

Fred Armisen's British punk rocker Ian Rubbish didn't retire when Armisen left SNL in May. Instead, he's been looking back at his early punk days, and over at Funny or Die, he's made a short documentary with The Clash's Mick Jones and Paul Simonon, who even attest to Rubbish's influence on their music. They even come together to play that Ian Rubbish and the Bizarros classic, "Hey Policeman."

Un 20 de agosto de 1981 unos colegas venían de farra a bordo de un R12 por la avenida de Beiramar de Vigo. Querían seguir la juerga en un chiringuito de la playa pero una repentina niebla y unas inoportunas obras en la calzada se interpusieron en su camino. A bordo iban José Manuel Barros, Manolo Romón, Miguel Costas, Javier Soto y Alberto Torrado. Conduce Julián Hernández, que había robado el coche a su padre para esa noche. El golpe fue tal que la compañía de seguros declaró el vehículo «siniestro total». Acababa de nacer un mito. Afortunadamente, ellos vivieron para contarlo.

Julián Hernández (Madrid, 1960) llega puntual a nuestra cita en una cafetería de barrio próxima al Retiro madrileño. Es afable y cercano, constantemente hace referencias a otros autores, personajes y músicos, como si no quisiera darse excesiva importancia a sí mismo. Viste con colores apagados: americana y zapatos negros, camisa azul marino y vaqueros grises. Sus características gafas bajan a media altura de la nariz y provocan algunos quebraderos de cabeza a la fotógrafa. Pide una infusión con dos bolsitas y fuma tabaco de liar. Julián no solo es el líder de una de las bandas más representativas del rock patrio sino que además ha sido testigo de la ebullición de una época. Lo sigue siendo aunque las apariencias engañan. Detrás de esa imagen pública de gamberro irreverente se esconde una persona sencilla, mucho más poliédrica de lo que pudiera parecer, donde ingenio y sentido del humor se dan la mano. La (larga) conversación fluye natural, los temas van saliendo de manera espontánea, zigzagueante y un tanto desordenada. Aun así, muchas cosas se quedan en el tintero. A micro cerrado confiesa lo que muchos sospechábamos: la antológica frase «zumo de naranja en las tetas de la negra» de la no menos antológica «Cuánta puta y yo qué viejo» está basada en hechos reales, como el resto de la canción. «¿Pero se puede decir quién disfrutó de tan suculento manjar?». «Hombre, no sé si debería…».

Te voy a dar una buena noticia: hay rumores de que los Kinks van a volver.

Nunca he tenido la noción clara de que los Kinks se hubieran ido. Los discos de Ray Davies también me parecen discos de los Kinks. Lo que pasa es que… ¿quién lo escribía el otro día?… A los chavales ahora les gustan más los grupos que les gustaban a sus padres, o quizás a sus abuelos. No hay más que ver la revista Mojo, qué saca en las portadas…

Lo digo porque vosotros siempre habéis sido muy reivindicativos de la música de los Kinks, nunca has perdido ocasión de mencionarlos.

Hombre, es que los Kinks son palabras mayores…

Así que más que de Beatles-Stones tú serías de Who-Kinks.

Sí, sí, Who y Kinks. ¿Qué tonterías son esas? Los Beatles y los Rolling Stones… Bah. Es lo mismo que pasó después con lo de Oasis o Blur. Pues no, Pulp.

Igual que con los Kinks, ¿veremos algún día una reunión de los Torrados, Copinnis, Costas…?

Creo que no. Si lo hubiéramos dejado, igual sí. Si es por el lucro indecente de los Sex Pistols, no me parece mal… [Risas] Pero creo que ahora eso es imposible, el grupo está funcionando.

¿Cómo fue el proceso de asimilación de todas tus influencias? ¿A qué llegaste primero?

Lo primero eran las canciones de Andrés Do Barro, de pequeño. Y luego la primera noción clara que tengo de rock, y de una canción que me gustara, era de Suzi Quatro, Can the Can, aparte de que me sigue pareciendo una sex-symbol.

¿Qué tiene el blues? ¿Es como el origen de todo?

El blues… coño, es una escala de cinco notas, tres acordes y doce compases, no hay más. Y luego todo lo que escuchas… no hay un riff de AC/DC que no esté basado en eso. No creo que Public Enemy estén al margen de eso. Todo está alrededor de esa idea.

Me hace gracia lo de «gallego en el exilio». ¿Eres el madrileño más gallego de este país?

No, hombre, no, igual soy el gallego más madrileño [risas]. Yo nací en Madrid, pero de casualidad.

Esto de intelectual del rock que alguna vez se ha dicho de ti. ¿Halaga, molesta, abruma, te da igual?

En todo caso, me tiene sin cuidado… Pero, ¿cómo que intelectual? El rock and roll es una cosa primitiva, de cómo volver al Holoceno. Hay una cosa, si intentar huir de los tópicos del rock, tener un pie fuera y mirar lo que es el rock desde un punto de vista de «no me lo creo todo», no voy a vivir rápido, drogarme y dejar un cadáver bonito entonces, pues sería como lo de Frank Zappa o algo así… Tampoco nos planteamos nada.

Tu profesora de Ciencias Naturales del colegio te definió como «un chaval rubio, muy modoso y aplicado». Ya de pequeño apuntabas maneras.

Eso queda fatal para un músico de rock, ¿no? Joder, Marilar me va a destrozar la carrera… [risas].

¿Tenías enchufe porque tu madre era también profesora?

Todo lo contrario, mi madre era la profesora de Dibujo, todos los profesores me miraban con mala cara como diciendo «a este lo puteamos»… Hombre, no era un puteo, pero no era un favor, todo lo contrario.

¿Cómo era la educación de aquella época?

Estudié en el Colegio Alemán de Vigo, laico. No era un colegio caro, ni rollo de pijerío. Había gente de todo tipo. Lo que pasa es que eran alemanes, con todo lo bueno y todo lo malo. Alemanes de un lado y alemanes de otro. Había profesores que hablaban entre sí y otros que hablaban pero no se comunicaban entre ellos. El día que me quedé con la copla fue en una excursión. Nos llevaron a una playa en Vigo. Eran dos profesores, uno del sur y otro del norte, uno como bávaro y otro de Hamburgo. Muy diferentes, hablaban diferente. Pero de repente uno, que era el más atleta, empieza a dar unas zancadas enormes y se tira al mar. Estábamos jugando y pensamos «¿Este qué hace?». Se tira, «plas», sale del agua y a veinte metros de la orilla levanta el puño y le dice al otro «HO CHI MIN». Era plena guerra del Vietnam y dije yo «¿Estos de qué van?». Todos acojonados… [risas]. Lo recuerdo con cariño, pero entiendo que Alemania vivió una guerra civil permanente.

El día que muere Franco estabas tocando la primera guitarra eléctrica de tu vida. No hubo mucho duelo…

¿Cómo lo iba a haber? Nos dieron una semana libre y encima me llamó Torrado que su madre le había regalado una guitarra eléctrica. Bueno, pues que se muera todos los días… [risas], que resucite y se muera.

¿Habías entrado ya en el Conservatorio para estudiar guitarra clásica?

Creo que sí. Es lo único que se me ocurrió para aprender. Fue por un amigo del Colegio Alemán que estaba estudiando allí.

¿Acabaste la carrera de guitarra?

Sí, sí. Pero era muy malo, la hice a trancas y barrancas. El pobre José Luis Rodrigo, mi profesor, que además era muy bueno y un concertista de la hostia… Yo estaba ahí y había un montón de asignaturas: armonía, acústica… había que currárselo. También dejé Filología al segundo año.

¿Llegaste a ejercer?

Qué va. Vi el panorama que me tocaba de compañeros de claustro y empezaba a funcionar el grupo y decidí posponerlo. Hasta ahora.

En aquella época también eras asiduo de unas jam session de blues en El Manco de Vigo, donde tocabas el piano y cantabas. El Sexteto de Blues…

¡¡Es verdad!! ¿Ahí tocaba el piano? No sé por qué tocaba el piano, lo mamporreo, pero no sé tocar el piano… Fue una especie de mentira. Pusimos en un cartel una foto de unos negros en Maxwell Street y llegamos a tocar en el auditorio del Ayuntamiento…

¿Qué tenía Vigo? En general, me llaman la atención las ciudades portuarias, véase Barcelona, Gijón o Liverpool, Hamburgo…

… Seattle…

También… ¿Qué tienen esas ciudades portuarias que dan tan buenas escenas musicales?

No creo que lo de Vigo sea extrapolable, pero sí que habría que echarle un vistazo. Supongo que en las ciudades con puerto hay bares abiertos toda la noche, y eso crea una cierta relación entre músicos. En el caso de Vigo, hubo una escena increíble en los años sesenta que está prácticamente olvidada. Había un montón de pop, rock, grupos tocando canciones de los Beatles, de los Kinks… Pero no salió porque casi no grabaron nada… Hicieron una especie de reunión a finales de los setenta, fuimos al concierto. Y grabaron un disco que se llama Reencuentro, creo, horrible, una cosa nostálgica, pero de diez años antes. Se lo debían pasar en grande. Lo hacían para ver si follaban.

Te metiste en la música para follar, beber cervezas gratis y pasarlo bien, según has confesado en más de una ocasión.

Hombre, supongo que es lo que hace todo el mundo, ¿no? [risas] No es cierto, era porque nos gustaba…

Treinta y dos años después, ¿cómo es el balance en función de esos objetivos?

El balance es que es mucho mejor la música, porque no me queda otra cosa más que hacer… [risas].

Tuvisteis una polémica con Héroes del Silencio por ese tema…

Fue una declaración de Bunbury en Primera Línea o algo así: «Nosotros estamos en esto por la música; no como Siniestro Total, que están aquí para follar y son unos bandarras…». Y contestamos que los Héroes del Silencio era mejor que estuvieran callados. Entonces empezó una historia que a mí me hubiera encantado que hubiera llegado a ser gordísima, pero no lo conseguimos: ellos tenían mucho éxito y nosotros no. No era como Oasis y Blur. Luego hablándolo con Valdivia (guitarrista de Héroes) nos reíamos a carcajadas, teníamos que haberlo explotado.

Tu madre también pensaba que estabas en el grupo para pasarlo bien, ¿no?

No te lo pierdas, que el otro día, cuando sacamos esto de una sola canción en Internet y dijimos que lo que queremos es grabar canciones como si fueran singles, el maestro Manrique, Diego A. puso: «Van a sacar singles por capricho». Hombre, si sacar singles es por capricho, todo es por capricho.

Ahora que están de moda por enésima vez los Beatles, matáis al Sargento Pimienta…

Está bien porque ha coincidido con todos estos homenajes a los Beatles. Nos vamos a cargar a los Beatles. Pero vamos a ver… si uno de tus primeros éxitos dice «Voy a cogerte de la mano», I want to hold your hand, y luego hay unos tipos diciendo All day and all of the night, «Quiero pasar contigo todo el día y toda la noche…», o sea, FOLLAR… De cogerte de la mano a echar un casquete hay una diferencia… Ahí ganaban los Kinks. O el My generation.

Dejas Vigo en 1977 para venirte a Madrid, ¿cómo era el Madrid que te encuentras?

Muy triste. Se había muerto el Militar de Alta Graduación procedente del Noroeste dos años antes. Hombre, con 17 años no puedes hacer muchas canalladas. En el colegio mayor, en el Johnny, había conciertos y eso… Era triste por eso. Policía por todas partes y todo ese rollo… Aunque también empezaban ya por aquella época en colegios mayores grupos como Tequila, Cucharada, Burning, el rock… Yo corté entradas para Burning en el colegio mayor.

Según he leído, te impresionó ver a Manolo Tena tocando el bajo vestido de monja con Cucharada en los Capuchinos de Vigo.

¡Era genial! Dije «Hombre, yo me quiero dedicar a esto, pero si me tengo que vestir de monja…». Estaba bien porque había un momento del show, Irrevocablemente inadaptados, en el que salía un tío entre el público y mataba al cantante a tiros. Debía ser como los Kiss o algo así, una especie de teatro musical.

Estabas en Madrid, pero ibas a Vigo constantemente. ¿Por esa época nace Siniestro Total?

Habíamos empezado en el instituto a tocar todos juntos. Torrado y yo habíamos estado en el Colegio Alemán, luego nos separamos porque cada uno fue a un instituto. En el que yo estaba, en el Calvario, ya estaban Javier Soto y Miguel Costas. Siniestro llegó ya pasado el tiempo, en el 81. No era una cosa pretendida. Tocábamos en casa y no creíamos que nadie nos quisiera escuchar. De repente, estábamos tocando las canciones de todo Dios y pensamos «a lo mejor se puede hacer alguna propia, por rellenar un repertorio». Fue también un festival que había en Vigo que se llamaba Nadal Rock, que estaba Reixa metido en la organización y dijo «poneos un nombre». Nos habíamos pegado la hostia en el coche…

Nunca un accidente en un R12 fue tan trascendente para la historia del rock.

Objetivamente sí [risas]. Nos pusimos el nombre que dijo la compañía de seguros y tocamos allí. Tuvimos que hacer las canciones por teléfono porque yo estaba en Madrid. Llamaba a Miguel, Alberto tenía cosas, Coppini también tenía alguna letra y lo hicimos así.

Empezaste tocando la batería en el grupo.

La verdad es que… ¿Quién no quiere tocar la batería? ¿Quién no quiere ser Keith Moon? [risas]. 

Tu primera batería te la deja el propio Antón Reixa, ¿no?

Reixa nos dejó el garaje de su padre y tenía ahí la batería. Pensamos: «Lo tenemos todo, esto es un chollo». Fue un crack.

De hecho, él compuso uno de vuestros primeros hits: Más vale ser punkie que maricón de playa.

Sí, fue una frase de él y de Rubén Losada de Os Resentidos, y la montó Miguel. También otra sugerencia de Reixa fue Nocilla, ¡qué merendilla! Es que convivíamos. Yo grabé la primera maqueta de Os Resentidos en un cuatro pistas.

Luego fue presidente de la SGAE, menudo cambio…

Claro… es que dices «ah»…

¿Estás en la SGAE como autor?

¿Dónde íbamos a estar? Era una herencia de los monopolios y sigue siendo un monopolio, más o menos.

¿Qué le pasa a la SGAE? ¿Se la han cargado?

Hay cuestiones políticas muy gordas. Lo último que está pasando, y al hilo también de la canción ¿Casualidad? No lo creo, coincide que la SGAE entra dentro de unos procesos internos muy chungos justo en el momento que se está tramitando una Ley de la Propiedad Intelectual, que es muy interesante tramitarla sin que haya una agrupación de autores sólida que llegue y diga «esto no puede ser».

Entonces, ¿Reixa ha sido cabeza de turco?

Sí, hay muchas cosas, es tal el follón… Creo que Teddy Bautista hizo cosas muy buenas cuando llegó; limpió la historia, metió a la SGAE en la modernidad, pero no se puede estar tanto tiempo en un mismo puesto, las cosas se pueden ir de las manos. Teddy Bautista se quedó en esa idea de los ochenta, que estaba bien, pero llegó un momento en que no…

Desde luego la campaña de comunicación no ha sido muy buena, parece que la SGAE es la que roba.

Hasta límites delirantes, la gente odia más a la SGAE que a los bancos. La imagen ha sido horrible, y luego la gestión interna, lo de la pasta, ha sido la debacle, pero como todo en este país, rasca un poco en cualquier lado. Luego no han conseguido hacer entender a la gente eso que ponía en los vinilos de «prohibida la reproducción pública». Tú compras eso y lo reproduces para ti, si lo pones en otro lado y ganas dinero…

Ya, pero ¿cómo se hace entender eso en la era de Internet?

Ahora mismo la SGAE no tiene más opción que la competencia, y que se ponga las pilas todo el mundo. Luego también hay otra cosa: sin derechos de autor probablemente no se puedan generar contenidos nuevos. En la red es todo gratis, salvo lo nuevo. Hay muchísimas cosas, tienes todos los podcasts del mundo, puedes escuchar lo que quieras en YouTube.

Estuviste metido en el mundillo discográfico: en 1987 con Baterías Taponadas y en 2005 fundas Discos de Freno.

Era para sacar los discos de los amigos o nuestros, tanto lo de Baterías Taponadas como lo de Discos de Freno. Pero uno no vale para eso. La idea de una discográfica que tenga un criterio para sacar cosas es muy complicada si no tienes a nadie más. En el caso de Discos de Freno estaba Mario Pacheco echándonos una mano…

Una curiosidad: ¿cómo consigue uno librarse de la mili a los diez días?

Por pies cavos, se supone que unas botas militares me iban a hacer daño y no podría desfilar. ¡Yo, que he usado botas militares casi toda mi vida! 

¿Qué tal fue la experiencia?

Si hubiera llegado a saber que eran diez días hubiera firmado con alegría, pero como no lo sabía, fueron horribles. Cuando me largaron pensé que a lo mejor no había estado tan mal.

¿Lo mejor que hizo Aznar fue suprimirla?

No, no es lo mejor. Yo ahí estoy con Sánchez Ferlosio, que escribió un artículo totalmente a contracorriente diciendo que era un error hacer un ejército profesional porque se desliga de la sociedad, en lo otro fluye gente que no tiene nada que ver con el ejército, con lo cual no hay una idea golpista, por ejemplo. Si es un rollo, digamos, endogámico, un ejército es un peligro para la sociedad. Con lo cual, a cambio de joder la vida a millones de españoles durante muchos años, se conseguía ese trasvase a la sociedad. Es una discusión muy larga, casi filosófica.

La primera oportunidad en medios, en la radio concretamente, os la da Jesús Ordovás, al que le mandáis vuestra primera maqueta, ¿no es así?

Sí, en el programa Esto no es Hawai. Sin Ordovás no habría nada de esto: los Nikis, Glutamato, lo que fuera… Ordovás fue el que colocó en una radio nacional todo esto. Estaba Onda 2, pero solo llegaba a Madrid. El follón lo montó Jesús.

Incluso hizo vuestra biografía oficial. ¿Le tenéis especial cariño?

Le mandábamos jamones y cajas de puros [risas]. No, no es cierto, pero bien es verdad que más vale caer en gracia que ser gracioso, y Ordovás nos adoptó como el grupo que había descubierto.

Entiendo que no sería fácil radiar esas canciones.

De hecho, se lo pensó. La maqueta tenía diez canciones, ¡una burrada! Se la escuchó entera. Se la di en mano, quedamos en la plaza de España de Madrid. Y luego me contaba que escogió la canción que menos agresiva le parecía. Pensaba que Matar hippies en las Cíes o Ayatollah no se podían radiar, y cuando lo hizo fueron las que funcionaron.

Desde la perspectiva actual, viendo esas letras, esos títulos, esa irreverencia vuestra, ¿nos hemos vuelto políticamente correctos?

El problema está en que mediáticamente las cosas se sacan de quicio. Me lo decía Nacho Vigalondo, que tuvo un follón cuando puso un tuit diciendo que el holocausto era mentira. Viniendo de Nacho Vigalondo era un chiste, era obvio. Bueno, la cagó. Luego, hablando con él, me decía: «¿Qué nos ha pasado, Julián, qué nos ha pasado?» Lo crucificaron. España es un país con muy poco sentido del humor, no nos equivoquemos. Hasta el otro día Jiménez Losantos decía que Gila era un humorista de mierda y que estaba bien muerto. ¡Gila!, que a todos nos parece el paradigma del humor salvaje con una intención detrás.

¿Habéis tenido algún problema de censura?

Nos metieron a hacer un playback, el último que hicimos. Nos mandaron al programa que tenía por las mañanas Jesús Hermida, en Televisión Española. Fue el primer programa de toda la mañana, un magacín para marujas. En el 88 tuvo que ser, porque acabábamos de sacar el Me gusta como andas y el single era «Alégrame el día», sobre los toros. Hicimos un par de playbacks de otras canciones, y esa última no nos la dejaron hacer por la frase «por Dios y la Virgen María», que no quiere decir absolutamente nada.

¿Esa es la única frase que os han censurado en toda vuestra trayectoria?

¡Exactamente! Para una vez que les invocamos, van y nos tumban. La única vez que nos han censurado fue en el programa para marujas de Jesús Hermida por invocar a Dios y a la Virgen María. Pero claro, es que citarlos en un contexto de rock n’ roll… Por ejemplo, los americanos lo llevan muy mal, hasta los Beach Boys se lo pensaron dos veces antes de sacar God only knows.

Una de vuestras primeras actuaciones en televisión fue en Caja de Ritmos, donde coincidisteis con Las Vulpes y su Me gusta ser una zorra, que también se lo cargaron.

Nos censuraron, pero no por nosotros: se acabó el programa. Habíamos hecho ya el Musical Express de Ángel Casas, que se hacía en Barcelona. Y ahí era directo. Empezamos a probar sonido y sale el técnico de televisión y dice: «¡Esa guitarra suena mal!». Y dijimos: «¿Por qué?… Bueno, hombre, no somos la hostia, pero suena». Y el tío: «Suena distorsionada, eso no puede ser». Al final lo conseguimos.

Y luego fue Caja de Ritmos, que lo que hacía era pagar una grabación, dos canciones, y se hacía el videoclip. Y gracias a esas dos canciones sacamos el single de Me pica un huevo, que era un horror, y Sexo chungo. La verdad es que la portada era muy buena pero las canciones no tanto. Habíamos grabado ya el vídeo, pero la semana antes se emitió el de Las Vulpes, se montó un follón de mil demonios, un rollo político.

¿Cómo lo vivisteis vosotros?

Fue como diciendo «¿Están locos?». El ABC dijo: «¿Cómo se puede emitir esto? Que lo van a oír los niños, ¡vean la letra!». Y ponían la letra entera en la primera página después de la portada del ABC. ¿Quién está haciendo más difusión? Lo han conseguido estas chicas de Bilbao…

¿Recuerdas el último concierto que has dado en directo en televisión?

Sí, en Los conciertos de Radio 3. Todos los que están ahí lo hacen con todas las ganas, pero dentro de una estructura que no contempla eso. En cambio, ese formato con Jools Holland, por ejemplo, es perfecto: es un formato de televisión muy bueno.

Bueno, aquí, hasta hace poco, estaba Buenafuente.

Sí, Buenafuente era directo tal cual, y también Caiga quien caiga, con el trío del Reverendo.

Hablando del Reverendo, hay una actuación vuestra antológica, en El peor programa de la semana de Wyoming, donde hacéis Yo dije yeah! y Cuánta puta y yo qué viejo, que la subtitulan en inglés como «Jingle Bells».

[Risas] Eso fue la hostia. Además, idea del Reverendo, que dijo: «Tienen que venir estos». Hicimos unas versiones aberrantes y el Reverendo tocando el acordeón. Estuvo muy bien. Ahora la música no está metida dentro de los programas, es como anecdótico. Un directo dentro de un programa general como podía ser El peor programa de la semana, que curiosamente también se lo cargaron por una entrevista a Quim Monzó. Es increíble: Dios los hace y ellos se juntan… Caiga quien caiga también cayó por injerencias.

Imagino que echar a Coppini no fue fácil.

Dos grupos como Siniestro Total y Golpes Bajos, tan increíblemente distintos con el mismo cantante, no tenían sentido. Era mejor reventar Siniestro Total, que se jodiera y que los otros siguieran. Y al final fue al revés.

Miguel, Alberto y yo hablamos con él. «Me lo pensaré», decía. Y nosotros: «No hay nada que pensar, esto no puede ser». Además, es un rollo jesuítico: o con nosotros o contra nosotros. Yo entiendo que había cosas que a la sensibilidad de Coppini le afectaban muy seriamente. Luego Alaska dijo que Coppini era el único majo de Siniestro Total, que los demás éramos unos heterosexuales en el peor sentido de la palabra… [risas]. Que nunca he sabido por qué heterosexual u homosexual tienen unas connotaciones concretas de ser bueno o ser malo.

Al irse Coppini, ¿cómo planteáis las voces?

Primero fue Miguel: era el guitarrista. Alberto y yo tocábamos el bajo y la batería. Porque Miguel, que siempre ha sido bastante vago y dicho esto sin ninguna acritud, ¿cómo se iba a poner a tocar el bajo o la batería? No… ya lo que sabía. Y entonces le tocó a Miguel, que ya había cantando en la primera maqueta. Luego ya cuando fichamos a Soto volvió al redil, era empezar a cantar entre varios.

Sin embargo, las letras casi todas las hacías tú.

En ese momento y un poco antes, Miguel renqueó un poco más en lo de las letras, porque también había que ponerse a currar y ya me tocó más.

¿Cómo surgían las letras?

Recuerdo escribir las letras casi enteras del Me gusta cómo andas en el tren que iba de Vigo a Santiago, haciendo el Curso de Adaptación Pedagógica, el relaxing CAP. Algunas las hacía a máquina. Un día tiré todas las letras de un disco a una alcantarilla una noche con Josele…

¿Las perdiste?

No las perdí, las tiré… y al día siguiente había que rehacerlas. Por eso ahora con los ordenadores soy feliz, se llaman así por algo.

En la Movida, ¿estabais todo el día de juerga?

Hombre, juerga, juerga… íbamos a tres bares y a los conciertos. Había una panda que era muy fiel a los conciertos, que eran los lugares de reunión, y luego a los bares. Luego también había una modernidad mucho más guay. Las drogas dividían… No sé si has leído tú La rabia de vivir…

Sí, el de Mezz Mezzrow, Really the blues…

¡Una obra maestra! Pues allí hace una descripción de cómo se dividen los músicos: los que fumaban, los que se metían opio, los que bebían… Así que las drogas también dividían. Si alguien se metía farlopa iba de una cosa, si alguien bebía en los bares iba de otra. Porros yo creo que había menos. Hombre, sí, la gente se metía porros para bajar el subidón de la farlopa. Pero nosotros éramos más de bares.

Recuerdo haber leído en Tremendo Delirio: Conversaciones con Julián Hernández. Decías que la gente se metía menos de lo que presumía.

Creo que sí. No era para tanto. Hombre, en algunos casos sí que la gente se metió bastante y hubo varias muertes por infarto. Y luego el caballo también era muy malo, pero también había otra cosa que mataba a mucha gente: el automóvil. Eduardo Benavente (cantante de Parálisis Permanente), por ejemplo.

¿Veníais ya pasados de serie vosotros?

Hombre, las drogas… eh… Orson Welles decía una cosa de puta madre en su autobiografía. Errol Flynn le había metido en la cocaína y decía que era maravillosa, pero tuvo que tomar una decisión: tuvo que decidir entre la cocaína y ser Orson Welles, y como solo vivió una vez, decidió ser Orson Welles. Eso es serio. Si yo me voy a meter farlopa me voy a dedicar solo a esto el resto de mis días, pero tengo que ser Orson Welles.

Luego llega Tierno Galván y dice: «El que no esté colocado, que se coloque».

Recuerdo verlo en directo en el vestíbulo de Rock-Ola, que había una barra y una televisión. Cuando lo dijo nos quedamos todos… Carlos Entrena, Juanma de Los Elegantes, estábamos varios y dijimos: «No… no está diciendo esto». Creo que no sabía lo que decía.

¿Cómo era la relación entre grupos? ¿Había más camaradería o rivalidad?

Yo recuerdo, y siempre lo agradeceré, el primer concierto que no fue en Rock-Ola: fue en el Marquee, que Juanma Del Olmo, de Los Elegantes, nos dejó un ampli. Los Elegantes y Siniestro Total se suponía que podían ser como enemigos irreconciliables y éramos amigos. De hecho, salíamos Víctor Coyote, que era un rocker, Juanma que era un mod y yo que era un punk, con varios amigos más, en la misma pandilla juntos. Y claro, los mods, los rockers y los punks no entendían nada. Se supone que había que ser de una tribu irreconciliable. A nosotros nos daba igual.

Viéndolo en la distancia, ¿se han mitificado esos años? Por ejemplo, creo que fue Alaska la que dijo que no era para tanto, que al final eran cuatro gatos yendo a conciertos.

Aquí hay un debate, como plantea el libro de Guillem Martínez y Jordi Costa, Cultura de la Transición. No. Era muy bueno. Fue muy bueno que salieran compañías de discos independientes, que la gente hiciera cosas, que Almodóvar hiciera películas, ahora que se lo quiere cargar todo el mundo, es muy importante. Que además la cultura popular del siglo XX llegara de una forma más implantada: libros, películas, música… Estuvo muy bien. Pero de ahí a engrandecerlo como tremenda explosión creativa y el parnaso, no. Los cuatro monas que hacen lo que tienen que hacer y que hay ahora mismo. Hay un hombre en España que lo hace todo [risas].

Diego A. Manrique os definió en una ocasión como «unos chicos tímidos, de buenos modales y habla dulce: la transformación ocurre en el escenario donde se convierten en diablos homicidas».

[Risas] Eso lo escribió en una revista de cómics.

¿La actitud punk aparecía solo en el escenario?

Éramos unas monjas, hasta en el escenario casi me lo parece ahora [risas]. Fue curioso ese comentario de Manrique. ¿Qué le vamos a hacer? Éramos gallegos…

No erais tan punkis como os pintaban.

Hombre, no matábamos viejas por la calle, ni hippies en las Cíes.

¿Os ha tratado siempre bien la prensa?

Lo que te decía antes: más vale caer en gracia que ser gracioso. Resultaba muy exótico unos tíos de una ciudad que ni salía en los mapas, gallegos… Vascos y catalanes estaban muy bien considerados en Madrid, pero los gallegos… Estos que tienen los mesones, el pulpo y tal. De alguna manera les caímos bien. Y también nos cayeron bien ellos a nosotros. Los clásicos de la radio como Juan de Pablos, Diego Manrique… Éramos fans de Diego, fue el primero que escribió notas sobre Robert Johnson. Conocer a Diego, a Moncho Alpuente… fue muy serio para nosotros. Con las divergencias que podamos tener, pero es muy divertida esa historia.

¿Cómo has percibido el cambio en el periodismo musical?

Es verdad que el exceso de información es un problema para escoger… No lo sé muy bien. El mundo es distinto. No es un locutor que escucha todo el país a la vez en un solo momento de un día a la semana. Ahora hay muchos blogs, y muy buenos, algunos horribles, y hay gente con un criterio de la hostia.

La primera vez que viajáis a Memphis es para el disco Made in Japan. Fuisteis con traductor de inglés y todo.

¡Eso es porque estos eran unos maricas! Yo me defendía algo, pero estos dijeron que viniera alguien. Vino Omar, que se excedió en sus funciones, afortunadamente, y se pasó toda la grabación traduciendo al inglés las letras a Hardy. Cada letra que leía traducida se descojonaba de la risa y yo creo que nuestra amistad con Hardy viene por la traducción de Omar, que el tío dijo: «Buah, esto es genial». Genial que alguien se atreva a decir esto.

En Memphis grabamos Policlínico y Made in Japan, y mezclamos el Cultura Popular y el Sesión Vermú.

Al llegar allí Hardy, el productor, os alerta: «En Memphis hay muchas putas, pero algunas son hombres». ¿Aprendisteis la lección?

Casi me llueven unas hostias… Nos fuimos a Nueva Orleans justo el fin de semana que teníamos libre. Estuvimos unas setenta y dos horas de juerga. Una de las noches acabamos en un sitio de striptease de película, canalla y tal, donde evidentemente hay putas. Se me acercó una negra que me llevaba casi la cabeza, iba con otra tía blanca y más bajita. Me entraron: «¿Te vienes conmigo?». Entonces yo cojo, la miro y le pregunto a su amiga: «¿Es un hombre o una mujer?» [risas]. No me voló la cabeza de unas hostias la tía de milagro.

¿Recuerdas alguno de los libros que te pillaste?

[Se lo piensa] La Dialéctica negativa de Ben Watson, un libro sobre Frank Zappa, los libros que sacaba la iglesia del Subgenius Church, que son unos zumbados. En una librería de viejo en Memphis encontré la primera edición del Ulises en Estados Unidos con la sentencia del juez.

También encontrasteis a la hija de Jerry Lee Lewis un poco perjudicada en un garito, ¿no? ¿Cómo es esa historia?

Eso fue cuando hicimos las mezclas del Cultura Popular, solo fuimos Segundo y yo. Segundo se volvió. Hardy me dijo: «Mira, aquí tienes las llaves de la casa, las llaves de uno de los dos coches, te voy a ignorar, a tu bola». Y yo dije «Joder, esto es jauja». Resulta que tocaban ZZ Top unos días después. Hardy llamó a Billy Gibbons y fuimos. Era en un teatro, vimos el bolo y al acabar fuimos a saludar en el camerino. Me hice una foto con Billy Gibbons. Allí había una tía borracha, montando un pollo. Les pregunté: «¿Y esta tía?». «Está todo el día pasada, es la hija de Jerry Lee Lewis». Te dice eso Billy Gibbons y yo en plan «Es imposible, no me lo creo». Al salir había un montón de gente esperando a ZZ Top para hacerse fotos, autógrafos… Luego me decía Hardy en el coche: «Claro, es que yo me olvido de que es una superestrella del rock, Billy Gibbons es mi amigo».

¿En Estados Unidos la música se vive de otra manera que aquí?

Aquí la música es una excepción y allí es cotidiana. Tú vas a un bar y hay unos tíos tocando. Aquí no, es una excepción, «vas a un concierto», allí vas a tomar unas cervezas y está Magic Slim tocando, que eso me ha pasado. «¡Magic Slim, no jodas!».

Fue en la grabación del Made in Japan cuando Miguel Costas empezó a distanciarse, ¿verdad?

Fue justo grabarlo y de repente renqueó la historia y se acabó.

¿Cuál ha sido para ti la salida más traumática de todas las que ha vivido Siniestro Total?

Pues no lo sé… Se supone que el icono es Miguel pero lo de Germán (Coppini) fue durísimo. Germán era el cantante, la imagen de Siniestro Total, eso fue acabar con el grupo. Se va Germán y ya está. Pero no, seguimos. Lo de Miguel fue algo más natural, se integraba menos. En cuanto grabó lo suyo se largó. Lo último que recuerdo de él en Memphis, cuando aún no teníamos título para el disco, es que fuimos a comer a un mexicano que había al lado. Miguel estaba fascinado porque en todo lo que compraba ponía Made in China y él quería que pusiese Made in USA. Así que va y me dice: «Joder, podíamos llamar al disco Made in Japan». Dicho y hecho, ese fue el título del disco. Hardy pensó que estábamos locos.

Uno de vuestros discos más emblemáticos y más heavy-rock, podría decirse.

Sí, sí, es heavy, alguna cosa es muy heavy.

Aunque después de treinta y dos años entiendo que vosotros estáis, de alguna manera, por encima de estilos.

Yo creo que nunca hemos tenido. Somos un grupo sin género. Ya en el primer disco hay cosas que se parecen a los Cure, otras a los Jam y otras que se pueden parecen a los Dictators. Eso ya es un batiburrillo de cojones.

¿Veremos algún reality con Julián Hernández? ¿Estilo Alaska y Mario o más tirando a lo que hacía Ozzy Osbourne?

¡¡Dios mío, no!! Más expuestos que estamos, creo que no hace falta. Somos unos exhibicionistas. Yo entiendo lo de Alaska, es un pastón y a Alaska la música le tiene un poco sin cuidado, le interesa más la farándula. En eso fue coherente, siempre lo dijo.

Me llamaron alguna vez para ir a debates, de opinador. Me dijeron que me pagaban, para empezar, «cojonudo». El tema del debate es hombres y mujeres, que es como decir «piedra, papel o tijera», «hierro o acero», carece de sentido… «¿Qué quiere usted decir?». La histórica y literaria guerra de sexos puede dar para muchas cosas y puede ser muy divertida. Y me dicen: «Lo que queremos en realidad es que tú defiendas a los hombres y además te cabrees». Estaba totalmente dirigido. Por eso no me creo nada cuando veo un debate.

Tienes una larga trayectoria como columnista.

Sí, en El Faro de Vigo y en El País de Galicia, que cuando se creó llamaron a una serie de gente, a los serios, a los menos serios pero más enterados como Antón Losada, y luego me llamaron a mí porque escribía en el Faro. La verdad es que agradecí mucho lo de escribir en El País. Lo que pasa es que luego El País acabó como el rosario de la aurora…

Ahora solo escribo en el Faro, llevo como unos doce años, todas las semanas. Estaba intentando hacer un blog para agrupar todos los artículos, además con el mismo nombre de la columna, Noticias del Submundo, pero técnicamente soy un desastre.

¿Qué diferencia hay entre redactar un artículo de opinión, escribir un libro y componer una canción?

En realidad no lo sé… Decía una cosa el Wyoming, que es uno de los maestros, cuando andábamos por Barcelona y le hicieron una entrevista por teléfono. Yo estaba al lado y él decía: «Bueno, diferencia cuando hago televisión, hago cine o un concierto con el Reverendo… No hay ninguna, unas veces es con un lápiz, otras veces es con una cámara, otras con el piano del Reverendo». No es cierto, pero bueno, yo creo que el denominador común es intentar hacerlo bien y sin faltas de ortografía, que no es poco… [Risas].

Has tenido buena relación con el mundo del cine y el mundillo de la farándula.

Bueno, es que la cultura popular llegó a España. Antes la gente del cine no se relacionaba con los grupos de música. Llegó una generación nueva de gente haciendo cosas que lo mismo que se ponían detrás de una cámara podían hacer cómics o escribir libros. El caso de Álex de la Iglesia, por ejemplo.

En tu libro escribías algo así como «que la fama no me vuelva gilipollas».

Sí, y yo creo que de alguna forma gilipollas somos… [Risas].

Siniestro Total es un grupo más conocido de nombre que por nuestras caras, no somos gente conocida. 

En 2009 escribiste una columna en El País titulada «Gallegos al tren» donde hablabas del desmantelamiento de la red ferroviaria gallega y la falta de inversión. Con el accidente de Santiago tristemente se ha puesto de manifiesto esa situación.

Horrible, horrible… Los accidentes pasan o pasarán, que decía Elvis Costello, pero aquí ha habido un cúmulo de circunstancias: el tren iba rápido, la seguridad falló… Coinciden las cuatro cosas que hacen que el desastre sea horrible.

¿La falta de cuidado pudo acrecentar el desastre?

No se veía venir. La falta de cuidado lo que hace es incomunicar Galicia entre sí, y luego que hacer un AVE en Galicia no tiene sentido, es decir, tiene sentido que haya trenes rápidos que comuniquen Galicia hacia fuera. Pero el problema está en que un AVE como el de Madrid-Sevilla, que vaya a 350 km/hora, es casi impensable porque son montes, curvas cerradas, túneles. Por ello, lo que hay que hacer es cuidar bien una red de cercanías: el artículo iba de eso.

Ahora que parece que se ha puesto de moda el género epistolar político, hace justo un año le remitiste una carta al presidente de la Xunta de Galicia, Alberto Núñez Feijoo. ¿Cómo fue?

Era un rollo gremial. No ha llegado responder. Esta gente está por encima del bien y del mal, no me consta ni que la haya leído. La historia fue que Núñez Feijoo le dijo a Beiras en tono despectivo: «Es que estos pianistas…». Un momento, ¿cómo que pianistas? No disparen al pianista… Era un desprecio hacia la música. Hombre, si usted piensa que ser pianista es despreciable, mal vamos, es un síntoma muy grave.

¿El político de hoy no escucha al ciudadano?

Podría decir una ristra de insultos pero no es el caso, probablemente haya gente bienintencionada y todo eso. De todas formas, hemos puesto a la gente más incapaz y gente iletrada. Yo recuerdo a Luis Antonio de Villena diciendo un día: «Nos creímos que había una izquierda que venía de una cierta intelectualidad y no era muy cierto; nos creímos también que la derecha, como decía Aznar, era heredera de Azaña…».

En una entrevista en Carne Cruda de Javier Gallego hacías coña con una frase sobre Fraga: «Un hombre que folla bien no puede gobernar mal».

[Risas] La frase es de Karina Falagán, la Celestina de Vigo, una alcahueta de postín. Apareció su foto en primera fila en un mitin y le preguntaron si votaba al PP, y la tía responde: «No, yo voto a Fraga, porque un hombre que folla bien no puede gobernar mal».

¿Los políticos de ahora follan fatal?

Follan fatal… Y de hecho Fraga era un intelectual, cosmopolita de altos vuelos, todo lo hijo de puta que quieras, pero comparado con estos…

Haciendo la referencia fácil, España ahora es un siniestro total en todos los sentidos.

Por ejemplo, el libro de Cultura de la Transición cuestiona la propia Transición, el papel del rey en el 23F… todo está cuestionado. ¿El problema está en que esta democracia no es lo que era? No, perdón, vamos a ser serios: no hubo una Transición, no hubo más que una democracia que interesaba para un mecanismo de poder multinacional. Aquí no ha habido una Transición: ha habido una sucesión. No solamente la monarquía de Juan Carlos de Borbón es la sucesora de Franco, sino que todas las estructuras alrededor como bancos, Iglesia, Ejército, Policía… no se limpiaron. Que podamos ir a votar de vez en cuando no significa nada, al final acaba pasando factura porque tenemos unos políticos dentro de ese mecanismo corrupto y mafioso por definición. Se supone que yo debería ser anarquista, tampoco lo tengo muy claro, pero el Estado es el mal, el poder absoluto corrompe.

¿Te gusta esa exposición política de músicos y gente de la cultura, como pudo pasar, por ejemplo, en la época de Zapatero con «los de la ceja»?

A mí no me parece mal que la gente tenga una posición concreta y diga «yo voto a este partido». En las últimas elecciones autonómicas me hicieron una foto con Beiras en mi pueblo. Claro, yo qué sé, es que Beiras es un personaje casi al margen de que se presente a las elecciones, además muy melómano, va a muchos conciertos. ¿Qué pasa, que yo apoyo eso? Pues no, no hago campaña por eso. Lo que ocurrió con el Partido Socialista con la campaña de Zapatero es que nos han demostrado cómo es el sistema por dentro, nos han hecho un favor. Bueno, más bien una cabronada.

Decías que tú eres más de anarquismo…

Sí, pero incluso contra la propia anarquía. Cómo voy a pertenecer a un club que acepte a tipos como yo como socio, que diría Groucho Marx.

En temas sociales, como por ejemplo con lo del Prestige, sí que tuviste una implicación más intensa.

Era imposible estar al margen, fue una barbaridad, sobre todo porque se vio muy claro la incapacidad política de la gestión. Hay accidentes, por supuesto, pero la gestión posterior fue demostrar que evidentemente les tenía sin cuidado.

¿Es lo peor que le ha pasado a Galicia?

No, eso fue la punta del iceberg. Los incendios, por ejemplo, es una destrucción casi mayor que la del Prestige. Eso es un negoción, hay mucha pasta ahí. Y luego todas las condenas que hay son en plan «una ancianita oligofrénica que plantó fuego». Pues no, hay un negocio de madera, de recalificación, de todo… Y seguirá habiendo.

¿Cómo has vivido todos estos movimientos sociales tipo 15M? ¿Hay esperanza?

No creo en el género humano. Partiendo de ahí, es difícil creer en nada. No es una cuestión de vejez, nunca he creído. Yo no milité en nada. Un colega me dijo: «Vente a una reunión de la Liga Comunista Revolucionaria». Soy vuestro amigo, pero no voy a militar. Se supone que es un pedigrí haber militado, me tiene sin cuidado. Lo que sería bueno es una conciencia que sí había en la izquierda que supongo que ahora hay en la derecha, que es pasar por una especie de examen de entrada. El que entraba en la Liga Comunista Revolucionaria tenía que haber leído determinadas cosas. «Qué dice Marx, qué dice Trotsky. Lo sabes, pues venga, pasa».

«El rock y el nacionalismo no se llevan bien porque el nacionalismo pensaba que el rock era imperialista». Esta frase la dices en Conversaciones con Julián Hernández. ¿Sigue vigente?

No se llevaban bien, en pasado. Sí, lo pensaban seriamente, creían que era música yanqui. Pero ahí los vascos fueron unos cracks, Fermín y toda la peña hicieron rock de la hostia y el nacionalismo dijo «esto también es nuestro». En Galicia llegaron Os Resentidos y empezaron a cantar en gallego. Fue crucial. Ahora ningún partido político va a despreciar a un grupo de rock.

En algún sitio decías con sorna que habíais hecho más por el nacionalismo vosotros que Os Resentidos, porque ellos cantaban el gallego y llegaban a menos gente.

Sí… Hay una cuestión extraña. A Rómulo Sanjurjo le dijeron en Andalucía: «Ah, claro, que tú tocas con el de Siniestro, está muy bien ese grupo, qué pena que canten en gallego, hombre…». [Risas]. Supongo que el sentido del humor es lo que entienden como gallego. Miña terra galega solo tiene esa frase en gallego.

¿España es una nación de naciones?

Para darnos cuenta habría que hacer como decía Moncho Alpuente: «¿Por qué no lo rompemos todo? Que cada uno se vaya por su lado y luego ya nos volveremos a juntar, es una península». Portugal es independiente y Cataluña no, azares de la historia. Lo que pasa es que se demonizan cosas que son legítimas y en nombre de aspiraciones legítimas también se hacen barbaridades. Vender a los catalanes que la independencia vaya a ser la solución a sus problemas sociales y económicos, cuidado. Y es perfectamente legítima la aspiración a la independencia.

Una vez estábamos en el Antzokia en Bilbao, con la gira de la Historia del blues, que venía Manuel Manquiña y se pone a despotricar: «¿Cómo les vamos a dar la independencia con lo bien que se come aquí? Imposible, ¡viva la Guardia Civil!». Así, a grito pelao, y pasa uno de los del Antzokia, un viejo abertzale, militante, y dice: «Ah, que sois vosotros, no pasa nada entonces» [risas].

Está bien que la gente sea nacionalista, como si son paracaidistas, me da lo mismo. El problema no es ese. Supongo que es más profundo y no solo en Cataluña.

Hay muchos temas de Siniestro que servirían para definir la actualidad. Por ejemplo, yo no puedo evitar, cada vez que escucho Que corra la nicotina, pensar en Eurovegas. ¿Algo huele mal en Dinamarca sería una metáfora de la Europa del norte?

Bueno, primero era la coña de Hamlet, la corrupción de la que habla es una corrupción moral y perfectamente extrapolable. Dinamarca, sí, también. Todo.

¿El hombre medicina adelantando el copago?

Pues igual sí, no lo había pensado. Es esa dependencia de la medicina desde que naces hasta que mueres. Ahora que lo dices…

La frase «menos mal que nos queda Portugal» da título a un disco de Siniestro. ¿Existía antes?

Es muy buena. Se la inventó Reixa en Rock-Ola. Cuando nos estaba presentando dijo la frase. Y dijimos: «Eh, ahí hay algo». No conseguimos hacer una canción pero la idea quedó.

España se droga como remedio a todos los males…

En eso hay fuentes de Zappa. Al final siempre aparece el puto cabrón [risas]. Está basado en una canción llamada American dream.

¿Para cuándo Miña terra galega el himno oficial de Galicia?

Más cantable que el oficial sí que lo es, que tiene una cantidad de estrofas que no se sabe nadie… Un himno tiene que ser breve y ser cantado en comunidad.

¿Lynyrd Skynyrd saben que tienen una versión tan conocida?

Sí que lo saben. En un momento dado les dijimos que todos los derechos eran suyos, que los reclamaran porque nosotros no tenemos nada. Y los tíos dijeron que había un vacío legal al llamarse de otra manera. Así que esa canción solamente genera pasta para la SGAE. Yo estaría encantado de que generase todo el dinero para ellos.

En muchas entrevistas he leído que siempre reivindicas a Javier Krahe como uno de los grandes músicos de España. A más de uno quizá le sorprenda.

Suena siempre raro decir lo de Krahe, pero es que no queda más remedio… No todo va a ser follar. Hubo una ruptura muy gorda en los años ochenta con respecto a una serie de gente que se consideraba como no modernos: Moncho Alpuente, Javier Krahe, gente así… y que han sido nuestros maestros, referencias gordísimas.

¿Alguna vez te ha dado por contar el número de canciones que has compuesto?

Es fácil saberlo, SGAE te lo dice. No sé ahora mismo. Creo que para Siniestro Total, por lo menos que aparezca mi firma, unas cuatrocientas. Es demasiado, ¿no? Yo no sé si es mejor ser un one-hit-wonder, forrarte y se acabó, o esta carrera de fondo.

Después de esa carrera musical de fondo y de haber escrito un libro, solo te queda dirigir una película.

No, no, que les conozco, sé cómo son… No tengo ninguna intención, y eso que siempre da envidia, gente que consigue hacer lo que le gusta como Vigalondo o Álex de la Iglesia.

¿Te planteas tu vida sin Siniestro Total?

Siniestro Total es una buena maquinaria; mientras funcione y esté bien, para qué lo vamos a dejar… No tiene sentido. También siempre hemos sido un grupo un poco topo, es entrar dentro del rock para dinamitar tópicos. No lo hemos conseguido porque al final acabas cayendo en ese tópico: un gilipollas que toca rock, y mola. En la medida en que haya ideas y funcione la historia, no nos planteamos una tremenda gira de despedida apocalíptica.

Me da la sensación de que nos ha quedado una entrevista muy del pasado, a ti que no te gusta la nostalgia.

No pasa nada, tiene sentido así. Hablar está bien. Muchos músicos dicen «Qué horror, entrevista». No, te hace pensar sobre tu trabajo, es parte del trabajo. Pensar sobre lo que has hecho, lo que estás haciendo y cómo eso puede influir en lo que harás. Yo creo que es bueno repensar todo, como La carta robada de Edgar Allan Poe, que está ahí colocada y no la ves, en el mejor escondite.

Alguna cosa de la que quieras hablar y que nunca te preguntan en las entrevistas.

Está muy bien hablar de los Kinks. Los Kinks son muy buenos pero hablar de los Kinks es casi mejor.

Fotografía: Guadalupe de la Vallina

(Image: Eduardo Ferigato)

Traditionally, the Joker is Batman’s greatest foe and the focus of hundreds of Batman storylines. There's a common sequence of events: Batman captures the Joker and sends him to Arkham Asylum. The Joker escapes and commits terrible crimes. The cycle repeats.

So why doesn’t Batman just kill the Joker and break the cycle? Quora members pondered this question recently. Jesse Richards, an artist and web designer, responded that Batman’s commitment to not killing intentionally—his self-control—is his superpower:

Because the Joker wins if Batman kills him. That's what the Joker wants. Everything he does is to taunt Batman into killing him. In fact, the interesting part of their relationship, the real conflict of each story, is not to see if Batman will stop him (he will), but to watch Batman struggle with not killing him, because anyone other than Batman would of course kill him. This self-control is Batman's superpower.  

The Joker and Batman are each trying to prove a point to society - and really to us, the readers. The Joker wants Batman to kill him because he perfectly embodies chaos and anarchy, and wants to prove a point to everyone that people are basically more chaotic than orderly. This is why he is so scary: we are worried he may be right. If the Joker is right, then civilization is a ruse and we are all truly monsters inside. If the Joker can prove that Batman - the most orderly and logical and self-controlled of all of us - is a monster inside, then we are all monsters inside, and that is terrifying. The Joker is terrifying because we fear that we are like him deep down - that he is us. Batman is what we (any average person) could be at our absolute best, and the Joker is what we could be at our absolute worst. The Joker's claim is that we are all terrible deep down, and it is only the law and our misplaced sense of justice that keeps us in line. Since Batman isn't confined by the law, he is a perfect test case to try to get him to "break". The Joker wants Batman to kill a person, any person, but knows that the only person Batman might ever even remotely consider killing would have to be a terrible monster, so is willing to do this himself and sacrifice himself to prove this macabre point. Batman needs to prove that it is not just laws that keep us in line, but basic human decency and our natural instinct NOT to kill. If Batman can prove this, then others will be inspired by his example (the citizens of Gotham, but again, also the readers), just as we are all inspired every day to keep civilization running smoothly and not descend into violence, anarchy, and chaos. This ability to be decent in the face of the horrors and temptations present all around us is humanity's superpower, the superpower of each of us. The struggle of Batman and the Joker is the internal struggle of each of us. But we are inspired by Batman's example, not the Joker's, because Batman always wins the argument, because he has not killed the Joker.

I’ve never found this view convincing. Batman has the reputation for striking terror into criminals, particularly while interrogating them. It’s not just that he’ll turn them in to the police and they’ll go to prison. They’re afraid that he’s going to kill them. But if Batman is widely known in underworld circles for his unwillingness to intentionally take a human life, then why would they be so afraid?

Criminals easily and frequently escape from Arkham Asylum. This, too, must be widely known. So when Batman refuses to kill the Joker, he knows—or must realize eventually—that the Joker will soon be free to commit terrible crimes again. The only reliable means of ending the menace that the Joker presents to the ordinary people of Gotham City is to kill him. So killing the Joker, far from being monstrous, is a civilized act. In fact, it’s the most civilized choice that Batman could make.

There are schools of pacifism that may disagree with me on that point, but I’d find it hard to place Batman within any pacifistic tradition.

(Photo: Gage Skidmore)

I haven’t read E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey, but I’ve heard that it has a somewhat salacious storyline. I’ve also heard that the quality of its prose does not match its huge commercial success. Both the book and the trilogy of which it is a part have been bestsellers, so they are inevitably being turned into movies.

Charlie Hunnam, a British actor most famous for his role on Sons of Anarchy, was slated for the lead role of Christian Grey in the first Fifty Shades movie. But after reading the book itself, Mr. Hunnam has decided to back out of the project due to scheduling conflicts. Taylor Bigler of The Daily Caller reports:

The “Sons of Anarchy” actor last month was cast as the BDSM freak Christian Grey in the movie version of the middle-aged mom porn book, which is widely considered to be an embarrassment to literature and has Thomas Hardy rolling over in his grave. But Entertainment Weekly reported Saturday that the actor dropped out of the film due to “scheduling conflicts.”

Riiiight.

The studio said in a statement Saturday, “The filmmakers of FIFTY SHADES OF GREY and Charlie Hunnam have agreed to find another male lead given Hunnam’s immersive TV schedule which is not allowing him time to adequately prepare for the role of Christian Grey.”

Fans of the book were horrified by the casting decision because they actually thought that they could get someone like Ryan Gosling to act in what is sure to be the worst movie of whatever year it will come out.

-via Jim Treacher

In and Out of Clothing Collection originally appeared on My[confined]Space NSFW on October 16, 2013.

El último domingo de septiembre se celebra cada año en San Francisco la Folsom Street Fair, una simpática feria donde en lugar atracciones, puestecillos de golosinas y tómbolas con escopetas de balines rebosantes de peluches lo que hay son aparatos de tortura, tiendas ambulantes de cadenas y látigos, y parejas de hombres y mujeres azotándose en la vía pública. Es la feria del sadomasoquismo y el bondage al aire libre que en cualquier otro lugar del mundo posiblemente sería imposible celebrar. El único sitio donde los vecinos probablemente sean más libertinos que tú.

  

I thought it was over—the constant deluge of braggy “OH MY GOD, I’M SUCH A TOTAL INTROVERT! CAN YOU BELIEVE WHAT AN INTROVERT I AM???” posts in my Facebook feed, accompanied by the traditional “Care and Feeding of Your Delicate Flower Introvert Who Must Be Handled With Kid Gloves Or it Will Surely Die” or “4500 Signs You Are Totally An Introvert and Therefore A Vastly Superior Human” articles. They proliferated wildly for a moment about a month ago and then, thankfully, trailed off.

Then I happened upon an XOJane article today by Clarissa Wei, titled “Why I Love Being Shy and Why People Need To Stop Shaming Introverts.” Ugh. Should you not care to read it, the gist is essentially that the author implies that she is worth a lot of effort to get to know, but staunchly refuses to put in any effort to get to know others. Or, put more simply and musically…

I have no issues with people being shy. Everyone has moments of shyness or social anxiety, and different ways of expressing that. Some people don’t talk at all, some people talk too much. I go both ways, because I am just whimsical like that. Because I know a lot of people who are shy, I try to be conscientious of that, and not assume people are snobby just because they aren’t as immediately friendly as I am. In fact, because I know all too well how it feels to feel left out, I make a concerted effort, always, to talk to the person sitting by themselves at a party. I’ve met a lot of great people this way.

“Introversion,” however, has become more than a personality type. It’s become a universal code for “Just so you know, I’m way deeper than you are. Unlike you, I think about things. I feel things. Deep things. Which I cannot possibly share with the likes of you.” It’s become condescending. Half of the articles about this describe fabulously interesting people being constantly bugged about going out when they’d rather stay home and read Tolstoy. Who are always being wrested from their very important internal monologues by pedants trying desperately to make small talk with them. They say things like “Introverts are constantly having rich inner experiences.” Constantly? Really. Well isn’t that nice for you.

The truth is, everyone sometimes feels awkward in social situations, everyone hates small talk sometimes, everyone needs time alone to “recharge.” Many people have “rich inner experiences.” Not just self-labeled introverts. Personally, I don’t think anyone is all introvert or all extrovert– but I’ve always felt gross about labels to begin with.

This is where it starts to bug me:

In society, many people consider it unacceptable to punish someone for being Asian, for being gay, for being fat. In the same way, introverts should not be discriminated against, and as a bona fide introvert -– I’m standing up for our rights.

I don’t have to make an effort for you.

This is an integral part of my being and to mask it feels grossly dishonest. It just takes more time to get to know me.

I feel like there needs to be a PSA of some sort. You guys need to be more understanding toward us types. It doesn’t mean we don’t like you. In fact, it rarely means that. We’ll engage if the situation calls for it. Sometimes we even genuinely want to get to know you better, but we shouldn’t be punished if we choose not to.

Well la-di-dah, Ms. Humblebrag of the year.

To compare the plight of “introverts” to people who are legitimately discriminated against is just a little over the top. As far as I know, no one is actively going around “shaming” people for being introverted, which makes this feel a bit like a strawman. Perhaps a little annoyed with them for being so braggy on the internet about how special they are, but that’s about it. Not only that, but how dare this woman demand that everyone be extra delicate and patient with her, when she cannot possibly put in the effort to engage with them. Screw her.

I value people who are friendly. I think being friendly is the absolute best thing anyone can be, and I will never make someone feel foolish for having been friendly to me. I’m tired of these articles trying to make it seem like being friendly means you’re some kind of moron.

Every friendly person has been shut down by someone like Clarissa Wei in their lives, and felt embarrassed, and yet they didn’t feel the need to go on taking that out on other people. It takes a lot of strength and maturity to do that. It takes kindness and it takes empathy. Being friendly takes nothing away from you, but gives something to someone else. Only a very petty person would put someone down for being friendly.

You know, the best thing my mother has ever told me is “People will love you for the way you make them feel about themselves.” When I talk to a person, I try to make it more about them than about me, and that actually greatly reduces my own anxiety. You can’t expect people to like you if you make them feel like an asshole for talking to you.

Let me tell you a story. From kindergarten to 9th grade, I was like Carrie without telekinetic powers. I was loathed by an entire town of people. One of the fun tactics my bullies used would be to be nice to me for five minutes and then yell “psych!” at me when I really thought they’d deign to be nice to a dork like me. When I moved from there, and people at my new school were nice to me—the “preppy” kids in particular—I assumed they were doing the same thing so I was very standoffish at first. Turns out they were actually just very nice people and I was acting like a jerk. It took me years to get over that feeling, and I still feel that way sometimes. It’s my greatest fear. However, I was smart enough to know that it was my own issue and that other people didn’t deserve to feel badly because of it.

We do have to put in effort for other people. Even if it doesn’t make us feel particularly comfortable. If you can’t do that, then don’t bother leaving your house in the first place.

Pois xa podemos desvelar o segredo. O vídeo que vedes aquí arriba arriba é o primeiro teaser de Vento e chuvia. Mitoloxía antiga de Gallaecia. Un proxecto que leva madurándose na miña cabeza vinte anos, dunha confección moi complexa, pero que xa está en imprenta, editado por Edicións Xerais [consulta a ficha]. Aquí vai a sinopse do libro;:

Vento e Chuvia introduce ao lector no fascinante mundo da Idade do Ferro. Dez prodixiosos deuses que poboaron os mitos da antiga Gallaecia cobran vida nun universo con alicerces nos últimos descubrimentos da arqueoloxía e das ciencias do pasado pero sobre o que voa ceibe a imaxinación e a fantasía, enchendo con soños os ocos baleiros da ciencia.

Manuel Gago, apoiado visualmente polas vibrantes ilustracións de Manel Cráneo, emula unha viaxe no tempo con gravadora para colleitar as vellas historias que se contaban na noite dos castros e fiar con elas a historia dos deuses galaicos, ou sexa, as orixes máis profundas do rico imaxinario da sociedade tradicional galega. Un libro apaixoante, distinto, que causará gran impresión e que trae a máis vella mitoloxía galega coñecida ao noso imaxinario do século XXI.

Velaí que este é un libro atípico, distinto. O que atoparás nel é un tesouro descoñecido para unha gran parte da poboación galega: a existencia dun gran número de deuses, con nomes e atributos, aos que se lles nomeaba en linguas xa desaparecidas, por parte de xentes ás que non somos quen de pór rostro. Deuses adorados nos castros, nos montes, nos camiños e ao longo do territorio do noso vello país. Deuses enigmáticos, que teñen consumido litros de tinta de investigadores que tentaron comprender as súas características, roles e sentidos na vida dos nosos devanceiros da Idade do Ferro. A miña é unha aproximación literaria a partir de moito do coñecemento e da discusión xenerada nos ámbitos da lingüística, da mitoloxía comparada e da arqueoloxía ao respecto destes deuses.

Así que tedes neste libro relatos sobre Reue, Bandua, Nauia, Cossue, Lugoue, Berobreos, Poemana, Bormanico, as Sulas Nantugaicas e o Vestio Alonieco. Unha complexa malla de historias entrelazadas, cosidas entre si, nun mundo cheo das palabras que nos chegaron desde alí. Aventuras, acción, amor, traizón, morte…todo reunido, todo contado, con moito traballo e esforzo, a partir dunha idea de como serían contadas estas historias na Idade do Ferro, pero escritas para o século XXI.

Creo que estamos nun momento en Galicia no que temos que comezar a ver máis alá das “casiñas redondas”. Durante os tres últimos anos, na miña participación en diferentes proxectos arqueolóxicos, a principal percepción, o que máis aprendín, foi a “procura do Outro”. E o Outro estaba en todas partes, en pequenos detalles. Con Vento e Chuvia quero buscar a eses homes e mulleres, a eses pais e fillos, a eses nenos que un día encheron o que hoxe son espazos baleiros sobre os que aboian turistas e curiosos. Quero enfialos na árbore universal das historias, quero conectalos coa nosa mocidade, coas novas xeracións. Quero amosar que “hai algo máis” que casas redondas baleiras de nada. Quero traer o fume das súas lareiras.

Portada do libro

As poderosas ilustracións de Manel Cráneo
O meu contacto con Manel Cráneo na Torre dos Mouros elaborando a banda deseñada deixoume impresionado da profesionalidade do ilustrador. Propúxenlle se lle apetecía entrar neste proxecto e lanzouse de cabeza. Ambos os dous estivemos metidos nunha espiral de documentación arqueolóxica, viaxes por todo o país -todas, ou case todas as localizacións son reais-, debates, interactuando e aprendendo o un do outro. O mundo turbio, dinámico, treboento de Vento e Chuvia agromou das súas mans coma se el mesmo fose un demiurgo, combinando a precisión coa fantasía e a estética pictórica. Quero agradecerlle a Manel Cráneo o seu inmenso traballo.

A análise de Marco García Quintela
Vento e Chuvia é como unha cebola, pode ser lido de diante para atrás ou viceversa. Pódeselle entrar por un deus ou outro. Infográficos, índices e materiais especiais complementan os relatos. Entre eles, está o xogo entre o que sabemos e o que non sabemos. Pedinlle a Marco García Quintela, catedrático de Historia Antiga, que pechara o libro analizando que é o que sabemos e non sabemos realmente sobre o mundo imaxinario dos nosos devanceiros, sobre o seu panteón de deuses e os seus mitos. Marco traslada a historia da ficción á investigación académica, creando un contrapunto incrible para todos aqueles que desexan profundizar nos debates académicos ao respecto dos nosos vellos deuses. Entrementres, tamén podes consultar un texto de divulgación meu que te axudará a comprender o que antes, nos relatos, se conta e se “dá por suposto”. Non te esquezas que está transcrito de declaracións e relatos contados no século II a.C.!! ;-)

Un libro aumentado
Como xa saberás, non creo nos libros nun único formato. Si creo nas experiencias, que van alén do propio libro. As experiencias son as historias. Vento e Chuvia vén acompañado dunha web que podes ver aquí: ventoechuvia.com. O web, ademáis de presentarche o libro e poder ver fragmentos e ilustracións, ten dúas áreas reservadas aos compradores da publicación. A primeira área é accesible a través dun código distribuído no volume. Nela poderás acceder a moitísima información: desde bocetos, making of, material adicional e orixinal, facsímiles dos orixinais manuscritos, ata roteiros e a xeolocalización exacta do 90% dos escenarios descritos en Vento e Chuvia. Non só iso, disporás de roteiros familiares para explorar, cos teus amigos ou fillos, os lugares precisos nos que se producen os mitos. A segunda área só poderás acceder se eu te escribo a man un código no teu exemplar de Vento e Chuvia. Alí poderás acceder a tres historias adicionais que complementan ponlas narrativas abertas na publicación. Entre elas, a da propia portada.

Unha presentación única e máxica

Que cando poderás velo, cando poderás mercalo e todo iso? A presentación inicial farémola na igrexa da Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. É un marco espectacular. Será o mércores 30 de outubro ás 20 h. Ademáis da presentación máis ou menos convencional, estamos preparando un auténtico espectáculo con cinco actores consagrados galegos: Quico Cadaval, Belén Constenla, Soledad Felloza, Anabel Gago e Avelino González. Eles van dramatizar parte dos episodios narrados en Vento e Chuvia para ti, dun xeito moi especial.

Por certo, faláronche algunha vez na lingua dos galaicos? ;-)

E moitas máis cousas
Vento e chuvia é un concepto transmedia. É un libro, pero tamén son obradoiros sobre a Idade do Ferro en Galicia para ensino de primaria e secundaria, espectáculo teatral de pequeno formato, merchandising cos deuses…irás sabendo máis sobre todo iso conforme pasen os días. :-)

Quero agradecerlle a Xerais a confianza neste proxecto tan ambicioso e singular. É un proxecto para todos os públicos, para os preadolescentes, adolescentes, mozos e maiores; así foi escrito e concibido, sen fronteiras. Cadaquén atopará as súas propias lecturas nas andainas abraiantes dos deuses da Idade do Ferro de Galicia.

• «Mi abuelo hacía los sombreros a mano»

1. That happiness is a sustained feeling of joy that comes from being completely free of problems, obstacles and pain. Believing this will ensure that you never find it. Happiness is being adept in the human experience– good and bad. It’s being able to find calm amid a storm and peace in your heart because you realize those are the only things you’ll ever be able to control.

2. That said obstacles and pain are inhibitors of your ability to experience life. We’re taught to overcome, overcome, overcome when most of the time what we need to do is accept and embrace and realize that these things are catalysts of growth and most times yield nearly miraculous self-transformations.

3. That you can’t be anything but passive in your personal life. It’s fine to believe that things will come when they’re meant to– that’s not untrue– it’s just that you usually have to reach out and grab them when they arrive. You can’t forsake your ability to choose and decide in blind faith that some greater force will work them out because that’s usually just an excuse to avoid the hard work of it all. You have to act. The universe will respond, but not without prompt.

4. That greatness is the sole result of hard work. Greatness is working hard when given talent, opportunity, experience, an edge, an audience and a purpose. Working hard alone guarantees nothing other than inner satisfaction for having done so.

5. That your past always stays with you. Your past forms you, it’s part of the story. Fortunately, you can edit the narrative you tell yourself and that you tell others. Once you’ve sufficiently worked through that which you don’t want to linger, it most certainly doesn’t have to stay.

6. That inner strength is being abhorrent to weakness, emotions, empathy, etc. when inner strength really means not lashing out when you most want to. Inner strength is radical empathy. Inner strength is being proud of one’s own humanity and not trying to be anything but.

7. That reputation matters. To an extent you can argue that, but there are many things that matter far more. Saying that reputation matters is like saying what you appear to be is more important than who you actually are.

8. That the important things in life need to be thought through rationally. Safe choices come from rationality. Incredible things from a gut feeling to take a chance even if it doesn’t make sense.

9. That any period of time is a precursor to something that will matter more. I was always waiting for the “next big thing”– getting to college, graduating college, getting a job, etc. but the truth is that the only time that matters is now, and what you’re doing with right now. Anything else is an escape mechanism so you don’t have to deal with what’s at hand.

10. That you can fix everything and that everything should be fixed. Often, the most “fixing” you can do is to apologize and move on. To accept what is and isn’t and that what you thought should be really shouldn’t. That’s all. And more importantly, many things aren’t meant to be fixed. We just have to adjust our ideas of what’s right and wrong for our lives.

11. That we need to be fixed: that at any given point, you can and should be thinner, happier, prettier, more successful, less indebted to the bank and society, with another partner, happier with your partner, I could go on and on. The only problem with being who you are and accepting what you do and don’t have is what you decide it means in the greater picture.

12. That control is anything other than acceptance.

13. That everything is done to spite you. We tend to only see the world through our own line of vision, of which is limited, not peripheral and only focused on our interests. There’s a whole big bad world out there, full of people who are also trying to just get through it as we are. Not everything is an attack against you. Not everything is done in spite of you. Not every failure is personal. Not every person was thinking of you when they decided to do something.

14. That there’s a right and wrong time for love and success, and that the two cannot be attained in tandem. You don’t have to get it together in your 20s. You don’t have to get married young or ever, and you don’t have to feel bad about any of it. Traditional ideas of love and success were built in overarching principle. You don’t have to subscribe to them and you don’t have to feel guilty for that either.

15. That comparisons are what yield understanding. Many people will take reference points (usually in the form of other people) and compare themselves to decide how well off they are. This is a literal recipe for absolute disaster. It just distorts your self-image.

16. That you should settle because not having something is worse than having something mediocre.

17. That there’s anything more important than loving someone. There is not. Nothing is more important: not pride, not the fear that it will fail, not someone else’s opinion of it, not anger and not your irrational hang ups. If you love someone, love them. Loudly. And don’t give a shit about who hears.

18. That doing wrong to someone is permissible if given the right circumstances. It’s tempting. It’s murky water. It feels right. But it does nothing to help you as a person and it does nothing to help heal someone else who so clearly needs to be.

19. That the ultimate goal should be comfort and routine. This is only true when it’s interspersed with love and adventure and reckless abandonment of everything you thought you knew now and again.

20. That the family you were born into and the religion you were raised are what need to stay with you for your entire life. Though it’s hard to see it this way sometimes, both are choices. Make them.

21. That you will always “know” indefinitely. Often the journey to knowing is more important. Certainty is boring and leaves no room for growth. Uncertainty tunes you into a very particular part of yourself like nothing else quite can.

22. That the best love is forever love, and you need forever love to be happy.

23. That you should ignore the “haters.” You should ignore their cruelty. You should excuse them for being graceless about having something to say. You should feel sorry that they have to take it out on you. But you should listen to what they’re saying, because sometimes, (not always), they have the hate-fueled-courage to say what others will not. They’re not afraid of hurting you. They’ll tell you the truth.