morrisey in montevideo (and several footnotes)
11th December. Bilbao Airport. In 17 hours’ time I’ll be in Montevideo. While I check in I still can’t imagine how my legs will t into the ancient Iberia plane which is going to take me to Montevideo. I don’t have any trouble sleeping on planes. Above all, because I usually have a bottle of wine (or two) with supper beforehand. My suitcase weighs 11 kilos. *(1) Good. Whenever I travel, the rst challenge is to take as few things as possible. Packing the most appropriate suitcase for each trip became a challenge long ago. But before checking in my perfect 11-kilo suitcase, when I found out I had the chance to go to Montevideo, I did something else. As soon as I started looking at the cultural calendar for what was going to be hap- pening in Montevideo while I was there, the rst thing I saw was a photo of Morissey. 17th December, Teatro de Verano. Fuck! Buy tickets. Click.
It wasn’t Morissey that brought me to Montevideo (although I could never have imagined such a beautiful coincidence. It was cinema that
brought me to Montevideo. Brought us, I should say. The lm cycle organizer, another lm director and a producer are also on the trip. I’ve come with a short lm of mine to the Memoria(s) y Futuro(s) *(2) documentary lm festival, organised by the Uruguayan Cinema Institute and and the Basque Country University’s “Territorios y Fronteras” group.
The Uruguayan Cinema Institute’s cinemas, which are spread out over the city, are from a different era. In the same way that Montevideo itself seems to be from a different era. Maria Jose, who’s in charge of the Cinema Institute, shows us several cinemas. At one of them the Kauff- man/Vertov Family cycle is being shown. In another, Rock Hudson and Doris Day’s Pillow Talk is being projected. In a cinema close to Pocitos beach, Memory and Future works brought from a nation-hologram called Euskal Herria (the Basque Country). A couple of hours later, I’ll present my lm there. I’d better look around the video club and lm shop at the Cinema Institute *(3), and then we’ll have a beer at one of the terraces on the nearby beach.
When I say that the Cinema Institute and Montevideo seem to be from a different era, I don’t know exactly what I’m talking about. The thing is, you can’t say that Montevideo or the Cinema Institute itself are from the ‘50’s or the ‘70’s. No. They’re from some hypothetical time in which different eras are mixed together. I’d say that Montevideo, in itself, is a particular period.
We take advantage of the free days we have before the Cinema Institute presentation to go to the beach. To a village called Punta del Diablo. There’s hardly anybody in the seaside village. In a couple of weeks, when the summer holiday season starts, around 40,000 people will come to the dozen bars and couple of restaurants and supermarkets (one of them is called Supermercado El Vasco). Wooden houses, shing skiffs, lots of birds...*(4) The beach was almost deserted... although that sounds like a travel agent’s description of paradise, that’s what Punta del Diablo was like just then. So, being in paradise, why do we have to bring forward out return to Montevideo to after the night-time storm? *(5)
And now here I am again. In Montevideo, which is an era all of its own. Montevideo just before summer. In the city where horizontal and vertical were invented. Montevideo, as well as being a city with a wonderful mixture of different types of architecture, is also the city of murals, graf ti and signatures. The streets are endless canvases and it is they, along with the time you can see so many buildings have lived through, which distinguish it from a cardboard lm set. *(6)
As we had hired the car for more days, we decide to leave Montevideo and take a day-trip to the beach and go for a swim. Instead of swimming in Rio de la Plata’s chocolate-coloured water, we head north, towards the sea. I drive the car. I relax when I drive alone. I could spend hours driving a car. But I also like other people driving. Being the driver gives you an excuse to get out of the conversations taking place in the car when you want to. Driving a car, being a literally automatic exercise, gives you the chance to abstract yourself. We end up in Piriapolis, 114 kilometres from Montevideo. *(7)
17th December. 21.00. We’re waiting for Morrissey in the Teatro de Verano, which looks like an amphitheatre. Although it looked like rain in the morning, it is a warm, clear night. With a beer in my hand and watching a video on the screen they’ve put up on the stage, moved by Uruguayan rhythms, we’re waiting for the singer from Davyhulme. They turn the screen and the lights off. Morissey and his musicians climb on stage to the sound of opera. Although the title of this article suggest the opposite, I’m not going to write about the concert. I’m going to keep the privilege (yes, the privilege is mine!) of seeing and listening to Morrisey in Montevideo for those of us who were there. *(8)
At the end of the concert, the lights are off again and it’s darkness. I say “again” because Montevideo is dark at night. It’s a city with many trees and parks and little lighting, to the birds’ delight. We drive to La Ronda bar to have a drink. I don’t know it yet, but when we get there I’m going to ask for a daiquiri. I never drink daiquiris. The DJ in my head keeps on playing Morrissey. Montevideo did not kill the radio star. Montevideo it’s good for the birds, for night birds too.
The last night. To celebrate the start of the summer, they tell us they organised an outdoors party. The Reconquista party. Where Reconquista and Juan Carlos Gomez Streets meet. We go there. Is it late? The food and market stall have already disappeared. We decide to listen to live music from the stage they’ve set up there *(9) and, without paying too much attention to the lm projection in Fenix Bar opposite, carry on drinking. Summer’s beautiful when you’re living in winter. Morissey comes to the party too. We listen to There always be a light, Charming man and Kiss me a lot before they close the bar. The last chance to dance before we go out to the street. The hotel isn’t far, but it feels like we’ll never get there.
notes
*(1): Bearing in mind that it’s summer in Uruguay, this is what I put in my case for the 10-days: summer Dijon mustard-colour trousers; 8 T-shirts; 2 summer jerseys; 1 navy blue shirt; 1 white shirt; 1 black polo shirt; 1 retro beige summer polo shirt; 1 grey sports jacket; 2 swimming trunks; 8 pairs of pants; 6 pairs of socks; ip- ops; blue Adidas trainers; suede deck shoes. In my sponge bag: things for cleaning my teeth; Ibuprofen; Optalidon and Naproxene 550 gr headache pills; Aqua di Gio; Lactovit deodorant. And in my travel bag, my laptop, Houellebecke’s “Submission” in Spanish, published by Anagrama; and Gino Rodari’s “Gramatica de la Fantasia” in the cheap Booket edition. A blank page notebook; a 16GB USB pendrive; RayBan sunglasses and a guide to Uruguayan birds which I’d printed especially for the trip. The strategy for packing cases has to be taken into account as well and everything you wear on the trip has to be usable at the far end too. In this case, denim trousers and shirt, Pointer tweed shoes which tie at the ankle and a light green bomber jacket.
*(2): A strange title, no doubt about that. Nobody disputes that cinema is memory. Because those frozen lmed images of action in the past – and later philosophically arranged – are no more than a vestige of life. But the word ‘future’ has a special connotation. Is there any future for the cinema? If there is, what sort is it? And, then again, what about that (s) in brackets? Many lm-makers’ work is going to be projected from 15th to 20th December in Montevideo. Suddenly I realise that I’m probably the person with the least reason of all to be here. I’m too old to take part in the future and too young to see my name in the memory corpus. I won’t say anything, just in case.
*(3): The organizer of Memoria(s) y Futuro(s) has given me “La vida útil” lm from the Cinema Institute video club. After 25 years, the Cinema Institute’s nancial situation is poor and Jorge is out of a job. Jorge has never worked outside the cinema. Now he’s got to get used to a new world. The lm is set in the Cinema Institute cinemas I’ve just visited and it looks like nothing at all’s been changed since back then. The lm was given a special mention at the 2010 Donostia Zinemaldia. On the back to the DVD they’ve given me, journalist and critic Rosalba Oxandabarat’s words: ̈An unusual lm, local and universal, cerebral and emotive, a journey into memory and a play on the future long announced ̈. Memory and future again.
*(4): I made a note of almost all the birds in the Uruguayan bird guide which I saw on the trip. There were many of them, including the small white heron, the small white heron, the yellow heron, the scarlet-headed blackbird, the common seagull, the cormorant, the Flavius-family blackbird (locally called the ‘dragon’), the thrush, the mockingbird, the yellow-breasted king sher, a small bird bird similar to the white monjita or the southern crested caracara, and a travel podium for bird-watching: the elegant fork-tailed ycatcher, the northern cardinal and, by chance, the marvellous green hummingbird which came to feed off the aga- panthoidea in front of the shack (locally called the ‘ ower-pecker’).
*(5): Because the storm wasn’t the only thing to visit the shack at Punta del Diablo. To cut a long story short, in that Latin American Switzerland, while I was asleep, they broke in and stole everything of value I had. Well, almost everything. Early in the morning, when the guy next-door was taking his dog for a walk, he came across my tickets to the Morissey gig and my Spanish passport. And I have to admit that I was glad to get my Spanish passport back. I spend almost the whole day at the police station because of the robbery, feeling like the main character in a comedy I’m never going to lm. But, as I say, it was something from a lm you couldn’t repeat or make again.
*(6): Going through the streets in the Memoria(s) y Futuro(s) cycle organiser’s car and with the lm festival organiser and its producer. The producer is an architect by profession. He tells us about Montevideo’s architectural treasures and shows us some examples of it. The lm festival director tells us about the porn projection in which a member of ETA machine-guns a cinema in Bilbao. He still at Katy’s restaurant, the sponsor of the cycle’s talks. Montevideo is a city which gives you chances to talk. Or there are a lot of us cinema stylists and we tend to talk whenever we get the chance. In any case, almost every afternoon I take what I almost never take: a siesta.
*(7): “Whisky”. 2004. Pablo Stoll and Juan Pablo Rebella. Piriapolis and Argentino Hotel were the set for the most successful lm in Uruguay in recent years. Juan Pablo Rebella killed himself two years after giving the lm its rst showing. Uruguay is the country in South America with the highest suicide rate. Speaking of which, one of the people in charge at the Cinema Institute has said that’s got something to do with laicism. Somebody else mentions how boring the country is.
*(8): Although it’s dif cult, it isn’t impossible to write a good concert review. But I’m not talented for that. I wouldn’t know how to re ect the atmosphere and the feelings there. Morissey still has a wonderful voice, I can say that. And, listening to his lyrics and seeing what’s on the screen behind him, I’d de ne his show as political. He’s left-wing at a time when almost everyone in the arts is neutral or cynical; Morissey’s a bigmouth. Whether you agree with it or not, coming out with choruses like ̈Meat is murder, you are murderers ̈ and showing pictures of animal slaughterhouses in a country where there are four cows for every person might seem daring.
*(9): The groups which played during the day and the night: Dealer de Flores, El Falso Paul, Los Intrusos, Los Oxford, Cuchillo y los Cobardes, Dinamita y la Swing Factory, Surpluss, Los Nuevos Creyentes, Hotel Paradise and Hablan por la Espalda.
It wasn’t Morissey that brought me to Montevideo (although I could never have imagined such a beautiful coincidence. It was cinema that
brought me to Montevideo. Brought us, I should say. The lm cycle organizer, another lm director and a producer are also on the trip. I’ve come with a short lm of mine to the Memoria(s) y Futuro(s) *(2) documentary lm festival, organised by the Uruguayan Cinema Institute and and the Basque Country University’s “Territorios y Fronteras” group.
The Uruguayan Cinema Institute’s cinemas, which are spread out over the city, are from a different era. In the same way that Montevideo itself seems to be from a different era. Maria Jose, who’s in charge of the Cinema Institute, shows us several cinemas. At one of them the Kauff- man/Vertov Family cycle is being shown. In another, Rock Hudson and Doris Day’s Pillow Talk is being projected. In a cinema close to Pocitos beach, Memory and Future works brought from a nation-hologram called Euskal Herria (the Basque Country). A couple of hours later, I’ll present my lm there. I’d better look around the video club and lm shop at the Cinema Institute *(3), and then we’ll have a beer at one of the terraces on the nearby beach.
When I say that the Cinema Institute and Montevideo seem to be from a different era, I don’t know exactly what I’m talking about. The thing is, you can’t say that Montevideo or the Cinema Institute itself are from the ‘50’s or the ‘70’s. No. They’re from some hypothetical time in which different eras are mixed together. I’d say that Montevideo, in itself, is a particular period.
We take advantage of the free days we have before the Cinema Institute presentation to go to the beach. To a village called Punta del Diablo. There’s hardly anybody in the seaside village. In a couple of weeks, when the summer holiday season starts, around 40,000 people will come to the dozen bars and couple of restaurants and supermarkets (one of them is called Supermercado El Vasco). Wooden houses, shing skiffs, lots of birds...*(4) The beach was almost deserted... although that sounds like a travel agent’s description of paradise, that’s what Punta del Diablo was like just then. So, being in paradise, why do we have to bring forward out return to Montevideo to after the night-time storm? *(5)
And now here I am again. In Montevideo, which is an era all of its own. Montevideo just before summer. In the city where horizontal and vertical were invented. Montevideo, as well as being a city with a wonderful mixture of different types of architecture, is also the city of murals, graf ti and signatures. The streets are endless canvases and it is they, along with the time you can see so many buildings have lived through, which distinguish it from a cardboard lm set. *(6)
As we had hired the car for more days, we decide to leave Montevideo and take a day-trip to the beach and go for a swim. Instead of swimming in Rio de la Plata’s chocolate-coloured water, we head north, towards the sea. I drive the car. I relax when I drive alone. I could spend hours driving a car. But I also like other people driving. Being the driver gives you an excuse to get out of the conversations taking place in the car when you want to. Driving a car, being a literally automatic exercise, gives you the chance to abstract yourself. We end up in Piriapolis, 114 kilometres from Montevideo. *(7)
17th December. 21.00. We’re waiting for Morrissey in the Teatro de Verano, which looks like an amphitheatre. Although it looked like rain in the morning, it is a warm, clear night. With a beer in my hand and watching a video on the screen they’ve put up on the stage, moved by Uruguayan rhythms, we’re waiting for the singer from Davyhulme. They turn the screen and the lights off. Morissey and his musicians climb on stage to the sound of opera. Although the title of this article suggest the opposite, I’m not going to write about the concert. I’m going to keep the privilege (yes, the privilege is mine!) of seeing and listening to Morrisey in Montevideo for those of us who were there. *(8)
At the end of the concert, the lights are off again and it’s darkness. I say “again” because Montevideo is dark at night. It’s a city with many trees and parks and little lighting, to the birds’ delight. We drive to La Ronda bar to have a drink. I don’t know it yet, but when we get there I’m going to ask for a daiquiri. I never drink daiquiris. The DJ in my head keeps on playing Morrissey. Montevideo did not kill the radio star. Montevideo it’s good for the birds, for night birds too.
The last night. To celebrate the start of the summer, they tell us they organised an outdoors party. The Reconquista party. Where Reconquista and Juan Carlos Gomez Streets meet. We go there. Is it late? The food and market stall have already disappeared. We decide to listen to live music from the stage they’ve set up there *(9) and, without paying too much attention to the lm projection in Fenix Bar opposite, carry on drinking. Summer’s beautiful when you’re living in winter. Morissey comes to the party too. We listen to There always be a light, Charming man and Kiss me a lot before they close the bar. The last chance to dance before we go out to the street. The hotel isn’t far, but it feels like we’ll never get there.
notes
*(1): Bearing in mind that it’s summer in Uruguay, this is what I put in my case for the 10-days: summer Dijon mustard-colour trousers; 8 T-shirts; 2 summer jerseys; 1 navy blue shirt; 1 white shirt; 1 black polo shirt; 1 retro beige summer polo shirt; 1 grey sports jacket; 2 swimming trunks; 8 pairs of pants; 6 pairs of socks; ip- ops; blue Adidas trainers; suede deck shoes. In my sponge bag: things for cleaning my teeth; Ibuprofen; Optalidon and Naproxene 550 gr headache pills; Aqua di Gio; Lactovit deodorant. And in my travel bag, my laptop, Houellebecke’s “Submission” in Spanish, published by Anagrama; and Gino Rodari’s “Gramatica de la Fantasia” in the cheap Booket edition. A blank page notebook; a 16GB USB pendrive; RayBan sunglasses and a guide to Uruguayan birds which I’d printed especially for the trip. The strategy for packing cases has to be taken into account as well and everything you wear on the trip has to be usable at the far end too. In this case, denim trousers and shirt, Pointer tweed shoes which tie at the ankle and a light green bomber jacket.
*(2): A strange title, no doubt about that. Nobody disputes that cinema is memory. Because those frozen lmed images of action in the past – and later philosophically arranged – are no more than a vestige of life. But the word ‘future’ has a special connotation. Is there any future for the cinema? If there is, what sort is it? And, then again, what about that (s) in brackets? Many lm-makers’ work is going to be projected from 15th to 20th December in Montevideo. Suddenly I realise that I’m probably the person with the least reason of all to be here. I’m too old to take part in the future and too young to see my name in the memory corpus. I won’t say anything, just in case.
*(3): The organizer of Memoria(s) y Futuro(s) has given me “La vida útil” lm from the Cinema Institute video club. After 25 years, the Cinema Institute’s nancial situation is poor and Jorge is out of a job. Jorge has never worked outside the cinema. Now he’s got to get used to a new world. The lm is set in the Cinema Institute cinemas I’ve just visited and it looks like nothing at all’s been changed since back then. The lm was given a special mention at the 2010 Donostia Zinemaldia. On the back to the DVD they’ve given me, journalist and critic Rosalba Oxandabarat’s words: ̈An unusual lm, local and universal, cerebral and emotive, a journey into memory and a play on the future long announced ̈. Memory and future again.
*(4): I made a note of almost all the birds in the Uruguayan bird guide which I saw on the trip. There were many of them, including the small white heron, the small white heron, the yellow heron, the scarlet-headed blackbird, the common seagull, the cormorant, the Flavius-family blackbird (locally called the ‘dragon’), the thrush, the mockingbird, the yellow-breasted king sher, a small bird bird similar to the white monjita or the southern crested caracara, and a travel podium for bird-watching: the elegant fork-tailed ycatcher, the northern cardinal and, by chance, the marvellous green hummingbird which came to feed off the aga- panthoidea in front of the shack (locally called the ‘ ower-pecker’).
*(5): Because the storm wasn’t the only thing to visit the shack at Punta del Diablo. To cut a long story short, in that Latin American Switzerland, while I was asleep, they broke in and stole everything of value I had. Well, almost everything. Early in the morning, when the guy next-door was taking his dog for a walk, he came across my tickets to the Morissey gig and my Spanish passport. And I have to admit that I was glad to get my Spanish passport back. I spend almost the whole day at the police station because of the robbery, feeling like the main character in a comedy I’m never going to lm. But, as I say, it was something from a lm you couldn’t repeat or make again.
*(6): Going through the streets in the Memoria(s) y Futuro(s) cycle organiser’s car and with the lm festival organiser and its producer. The producer is an architect by profession. He tells us about Montevideo’s architectural treasures and shows us some examples of it. The lm festival director tells us about the porn projection in which a member of ETA machine-guns a cinema in Bilbao. He still at Katy’s restaurant, the sponsor of the cycle’s talks. Montevideo is a city which gives you chances to talk. Or there are a lot of us cinema stylists and we tend to talk whenever we get the chance. In any case, almost every afternoon I take what I almost never take: a siesta.
*(7): “Whisky”. 2004. Pablo Stoll and Juan Pablo Rebella. Piriapolis and Argentino Hotel were the set for the most successful lm in Uruguay in recent years. Juan Pablo Rebella killed himself two years after giving the lm its rst showing. Uruguay is the country in South America with the highest suicide rate. Speaking of which, one of the people in charge at the Cinema Institute has said that’s got something to do with laicism. Somebody else mentions how boring the country is.
*(8): Although it’s dif cult, it isn’t impossible to write a good concert review. But I’m not talented for that. I wouldn’t know how to re ect the atmosphere and the feelings there. Morissey still has a wonderful voice, I can say that. And, listening to his lyrics and seeing what’s on the screen behind him, I’d de ne his show as political. He’s left-wing at a time when almost everyone in the arts is neutral or cynical; Morissey’s a bigmouth. Whether you agree with it or not, coming out with choruses like ̈Meat is murder, you are murderers ̈ and showing pictures of animal slaughterhouses in a country where there are four cows for every person might seem daring.
*(9): The groups which played during the day and the night: Dealer de Flores, El Falso Paul, Los Intrusos, Los Oxford, Cuchillo y los Cobardes, Dinamita y la Swing Factory, Surpluss, Los Nuevos Creyentes, Hotel Paradise and Hablan por la Espalda.
