BCN WEEK | Barcelona's Alternative Newsweekly
Vol 1, No 88 | July 15, 2010

Editors' Letter


Responses

TACTELGRAPHICS // Galería Cosma @ Enric Granados, 3

El mes pasado publicamos una foto en la página 8 que enseñó una “ola de casetes”. Esa ola forma parte de una obra de Tactelgraphics, un equipo multidisciplinar formado por Ismael Chappaz (Técnico superior en fotografía artística, EASD Valencia) y Juanma Menero ( Licenciado en Bellas Artes por la Universidad Politécnica de Valencia).

Más información en ismaelyjuanma.com y tactelgraphics.com.

EDITORS' LETTER

Being fans of all things great and small in Barcelona, but particularly of the great talent that comes in unobtrusive packages, BCN Week looks for every possible opportunity to support artists, especially starving ones. This month we present to you our first annual writing and illustration contest, Dues Tintes. We asked for writer/illustrator pairs to form equipos and create an obra in one week based on pautas that were assigned randomly. Each team submission had to reflect a genre (like terror, western, or fantasy); each illustrator had to incorporate the style of a visual artist (like Banksy, Matisse, or Klee), and a physical line that we assigned them; and each writer had to incorporate the style of another writer (like Bolaño, Cervantes, or Joyce), and a written line (eg, “It ain’t over ‘til the fat lady sings.”). The winning pair is the one that incorporated all the pautas while simultaneously impressing us with its originality and skillz.

We learned quite a few things during the judging period, chief among them that either we give terrible directions, or people are terrible at reading directions. It’s probably some combination of the two, but there were quite a few entries that were neck and neck in terms of quality, but that we had to eliminate from the running because of a failure to include one or more of the pautas assigned. So, to the contestants: you were all great, we apologize if we confused you, and we’re going to revamp some things for next year. We’ve included as many of the best entries as we could in this edition, because you all created something (and sometimes many things) worthy of publication.

To our lovely readers: this is BCN Week’s last edition for the summer. We’re taking off in August for far-off lands (or at least Sant Pol de Mar) in the desperate hope that somewhere, somehow, we can escape the heat. Join us back again in September, write us while we’re gone so that we find our inboxes full when we return, and don’t spend too much time having dirty beach sex. In the meantime, enjoy these fruits of rushed labor while sunning yourself on a terraza, and we hope you’ll join the fray next year for Dues Tintes 2011.

Los Editors

CIVISME DE VERITAT

QUEJAS

Summertime is here again, and with it the Ajuntament’s annual campaign to make us behave better. In some ways, it’s reasonable: dog shit and human piss on the sidewalk does smell worse in July, and there are more drunken tourists bumping into things, which I guess is how the urban furniture gets broken?

But we have to draw the line at the new fines for bicycling on sidewalks less than 5 metres wide. Ours is not so much a complaint about the fear behind the delito - after all, if someone on a bicycle ran over my heel while on the sidewalk, I would probably roll back and smack the shit out of him - but about the tone of the poster, which seems to equate being on a bicycle on the sidewalk, regardless of whether anyone is around, with destroying public property and urinating in corners.

Let’s get one thing crystal, shall we? No cyclist would CHOOSE to be on the sidewalk if there were another reasonable option. Pedestrians are to bikers what those huge grates on country roads are to cows: something to be avoided at all costs. Once again, Barcelona, a city that trots out its huge numbers of bikers everytime it has to wave its “green” flag, continues to talk snidely to us at home. To the poster’s proclamation that there are 147 km of carrils bici that we could be on instead of the cera, we would ask the following questions:

1) Is the city still counting both directions of the bike lanes as separate lengths, thus falsely doubling the number of km of bike lanes?

2) Since, even if we accepted this figure of 147 km of bike lanes, it still compares to some 1,328 linear km of roads, will we be fined only one out of every ten times we are caught on the sidewalk?

3) Could we get the numbers on how many pedestrians were killed and/or wounded last year by a bicycle on the sidewalk, as opposed to how many cyclists were killed and/or wounded last year while biking on a street without a bike lane?

4) And finally, why, for a full month of this campaign, have these signs only been written in Castellano? Doesn’t that kind of undermine the entire language policy of Catalunya?

It has come to the attention of our staff that some Barcelona residents do not find the city’s civisme laws entirely adequate. That is, by choosing only to penalize normal city behavior (drinking, urinating, dropping a fiver for a BJ), the city is missing out on a panoply of more subtle, yet equally misanthropic, social assaults. While legal experts and Ajuntament budget planners may doubt the prosecutability of these lesser offenses, and therefore their revenue-earning potential, we here at BCN Week are ready to help you navigate these treacherous urban waters via those old standbys: complaint and conversation. Enviad vuestras quejas a edit@bcnweek.com.

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