Word: gaudy
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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DOLLY PARTON's brand of music doesn't normally conjure up images of a crowded club full of sweaty bodies gyrating until dawn. But that may change now that the singer who makes Antoni Gaudi's buildings look tame has had a few cuts off her latest album, Treasures, remixed as dance tunes. The deed was done by Junior Vasquez, a New York City nightclub fixture and producer, who says the first cut, Peace Train, is already a big hit at Arena, the club where he's a deejay. "If I don't play it, they start shouting...
...picture of themselves with Magic Johnson; with shaved heads or ruptured tendons. Barcelona has long been famous as a city of artists and laborers, a "city of marvels" where discipline and flight converge. Now, to the famous roll call of its industrious dreamers -- Casals and Picasso, Miro and Lorca, Gaudi and Garcia Marquez -- can be added some new names: Joyner-Kersee and Jordan, Scherbo and Laumann. Besides, Barcelona now has something to remember Thimbu by, and even in television-less Thimbu there is a rumor of a place called Barcelona...
From the Roman walls built 20 centuries ago to the weird and wonderful creations of Gaudi, Hughes spends much of the book recounting the history in order to explain the architecture--examining the roots in order to look more closely at the tree, as he might put it. Much of the most penetrating commentary--as well as some of the funniest apercus--is in the second half of the book...
...sheer force of the narrative that Hughes crafts from the most basis elements of the city--its buildings--arrives in the sensual pleasure of the writing. He takes on the architecture of the Eixample (the enlargement of the city which occurred in the ninteenth century--like Domenech and Gaudi--are never separated from the cultural context of Catalan modernisme and the anarchists' movements...
Puig, a brilliant eclectic, produced some of the signature buildings of Barcelona. One is the Casa Amatller, next to Gaudi's Casa Batllo, a fecund parody of a Dutch burgher's housefront, with mock-medieval sculptures by the gifted Eusebi Arnau -- including animals blowing glass and taking photos, these having been the owner's hobbies. Another is Puig's exquisitely decorated house for the Baron Quadras, now a museum of musical instruments; a third, the Venetian-Gothic Casa Marti, housed the center of Barcelona's artistic bohemia, the Four Cats cafe, where established artists like Ramon Casas hobnobbed with younger...