Word: barcelona
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Steve Redgrave, the Briton who is trying to become the most successful oarsman of all time, won twice. Redgrave, winner of gold medals at three successive Olympics and aiming for a fourth in Atlanta, took the coxless pairs with fellow Barcelona gold medalist Matthew Pinsent in the Sil- ver Goblets and Nickalls...
...19th century to refresh art from hitherto unused sources. One of the first artists to imagine a link between iron forging and formal sculpture was a minor Spanish painter, Santiago Rusinyol, an impassioned collector of the ironwork in which the smiths of his native Barcelona had always excelled. "I think of those forges of old Barcelona," he wrote in 1893, "where instinct was set free. There, in the darkness . . . I think I see springing from the fire an art without aesthetic rules or absurd restrictions, an art as free as smoke, born from fire and wrought in fire...
...that end, one clever madrileno revised a "KKK" graffito by changing the first K to a Y and consequently rendering the Invisible Empire as YKK, the international zipper concern. The sole defacement of one spiffy Barcelona metro stop declares, "!NAZIS NO!" In the United States we face racial and ethnic problems of our own, but most Americans, I think, avoid responding to far-right sentiment not because they agree with it but because they consider it simply too marginal to merit any attention. Either politically mainstream Spaniards like to vandalize subways, or the sentiment they observe seems to them...
Moreover, censorship is long gone. Sex magazines of every ilk clutter the metropoles' numerous newsstands, and there's a new condom shop in Barcelona's Placa Sant Josep Oriol. Whatever one thinks of pornography and contraception, it's probably a positive development that every day Spanish vendors sell products that would have rendered the old man apoplectic. King Juan Carlos' de-Francoization is complete...
...mystery remains. The unpalatable graffiti and tastless toys didn't wreck my vacation, but they did rein in my tendency to describe Barcelona as an urban Magic Kingdom with the Sagrada Familia as its bizarro Space Mountain. I couldn't conduct a poll of city residents and ask them whether they felt more whimsical than other Spaniards, but I'm convinced that Barcelona's smirky attitude is more than mere packaging. Yet it's mixed in with something ugly, and nothing! observed gave me any means of teasing the swagger apart from the dark cloud...