Chinchón

A friend of ours is the lead singer in a new band (Cat's Mother), and we were invited to attend their debut gig. Only problem was, it was in Chinchón, a small town about 50km southeast of Madrid. We've never been there before, but I had heard of it because they produce an aniseed liquor of the same name there (I could have said eponymous, but that would have been showing off).

A spot of internet research came up with a bus timetable, which turned out to be 100% wrong, and some photos of the place. The photos showed a cute old town, so we decided to get there early and spend the afternoon in Chinchón before the gig.



Chinchón's main attraction is the Plaza Mayor, which is where they stage their annual festival of teasing and killing bulls (note to self: don't go in August). All of the buildings on the periphery are three stories high and have balconies running the full length, and these are rented out at high prices to rich Madrileños for the corrida.


A bunch of hairy bikers take the Burro Taxi around the Plaza Mayor

Chinchón has an enormous church with a tablada by Goya. Surprisingly, for a Sunday, the church was locked up so we couldn't see it. There's also a castle overlooking the town, from where you can see an enormous cement works and Madrid on the horizon.



The gig itself was in the courtyard of a beautiful boutique hotel near Plaza Mayor: La Casa de la Marquesa. Why? Well, the bass player owns it, that's why. The audience of about 50 invited guests watched Cat's Mother play old-style R & B. Every member of the band was superb, the atmosphere was like a family party (the kind where the family members actually like each other, not the other kind), and, to roll out an old cliché, a great time was had by all.


Cat's Mother: bass player's not in this picture - he's hiding in a corner on the right


Dusk in Plaza Mayor

We got the last bus home at 1025 (the band having thoughtfully timed their set to coincide with the real bus timetable), and arrived at Conde de Casal at 1110.

Media

I'm talking about media, by which I mean devices to store music and videos on: wax cylinders, vinyl discs, tapes, CD/DVDs, memory chips, etc.

A week ago, our upstairs neighbour loaned me a DVD ('I'm Alan Partridge', if you must know: this character is one that we completely missed during our 12-year sojourn in Dubai, although I had read a few things about him). I slapped it into the portable DVD player with 7" screen that I had bought for MamaDuck last Christmas. Wouldn't play. Tried a few other DVDs that we know have previously worked on this machine. Nada. It's buggered. But still under warranty if we can find the correct bits of paper. Never mind, our laptops can play DVDs. Well, mine just read the DVD, said it was region 2 & 4 (Spain is in region 2 and that is what my drive is set for), and then refused to play it: no reason given. Never mind, we'll try MamaDuck's lappie. The DVD player software supplied with it was a 3-month trial, and it had just expired. Fecking hell.

I was in FNAC a few days later, and had a look at DVD players. The cheapest is about 60 Euros, but I was kind of interested in some combi-jobbies that are VHS video players and DVD players in the same box. But at around 300 Euros, they're not in this month's budget.

DVD regionalisation, by the way, really, really, really, gets on my tits. If ever there was an utterly pointless bit of technology, this is it. Hollywood moguls, pay attention.

I've been thinking recently about the increasing commoditisation of recorded stuff like music and video. Time was, when an LP (Long-Playing record) was a thing to treasure. Certainly, they cost a lot of money, but they came in a 12-inch sleeve, and the artwork of these sleeves was something to admire. In some cases they became very elaborate: gatefolds, posters, lyric books and photo albums were all part of the package. And then came Musicassettes (TM: Crap Names, Inc). These were very much smaller, and the attempts of the sleeve designers to include some of the excitement of LP sleeves were all a bit meaningless in the smaller format available. Then we got CDs: a bit bigger than a cassette, but still, the Golden Age of album art was clearly long gone. Now we have MP3 files. There's no wrapper whatsoever. And so the music is just a few gazillion binary blips on a bit of silicon. The concept of the album (or even the concept of the concept album) has lost its meaning. When you can download individual tracks, you lose the artistry involved in the assembly of an album with its peaks and troughs, excitements and relaxations. It's like just having the good bits from a symphony: you miss the foreplay that makes the crescendos so much more powerful.

I got hugely nostalgic a few weekends ago when we went to Plaza de Dos de Mayo. There were stalls selling second-hand LPs. I saw Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, an early Police Album, a lot of Rolling Stones and even something by String Driven Thing (sunk without trace, but I used to like them). Problem is, we no longer have a turntable, but I know they can be got.

Last night MamaDuck put a cassette on the machine. It stopped after about 20 minutes, and I thought 'I'm sure there's more songs in that album.' Then I remembered: you have to turn it over.

Also over the weekend, MamaDuck was having a good old clearout of the trastero (our store-room, under the stairs on the landing). You'll never guess what she found, so I'll just save a bit of time and tell you. She found a VCR and a DVD player. I guess I had erased these from my memory because we had no TV. But now we do have a TV, and so we can use them again.

At least, we could use them if we had the right cables. The VCR is fine, but the DVD is a problem. I can get the video to work, using an S-VIDEO cable, but the audio used to be pumped out through a 5:1 bunch of speakers that we donated to a starving Pakistani trader back in Dubai. There's no possibility of installing 6 speakers in our micro-piso, and so I've just been down to Calle de Barquillo, which is Madrid's answer to London's Tottenham Court Road. I came back confused. Most of the stuff I saw was seriously expensive: 35 Euros and upwards, so I wanted to be totally sure that I was buying the right thing.

It looks like my options are:
Fibre-optic audio cable - but I've only seen these bundled with S-VIDEO cables.
5:1 to SCART. I think this is what I'll go for. I'm going out now, first of all to check a couple of Chino's, because they sometimes have the most esoteric stuff for one or two Euros. Failing that, it'll be the gold-plated stuff from Barquillo.

Wish me luck.

UPDATE

Bought a 4 RCA : 1 SCART for 2.50 Euros. Doesn't work. Off to Barquillo now.

ANOTHER UPDATE

Bought a fibre-optic audio cable for 11.50 Euros. Fits into the back of the DVD player. Doesn't fit in the TV. Bollox.

Summer in the City

Throughout July and August, Madrid organises a marvellous thing called 'Veranos en la Villa'. It's a series of (mostly) free concerts at various venues around town. We caught one of them last year when we had just arrived: a concert by Daniel Barenboim and orchestra.

Last Sunday, we went to Retiro Park, and stumbled upon a concert by the Banda Sinfonia Municipal de Madrid. The program was entirely Spanish, the second half entirely pasos dobles to which quite a few people were dancing on the gravel. The band are performing every Sunday at midday through the summer, so today we got there early enough to be able to get one of the thousand or so folding chairs that the band provides.

Today's program included Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, but no cannons. 'Banda' is possibly a misleading term - it makes them sound like a Yorkshire pit brass band, but actually it's very nearly a full symphony orchestra, lacking only the violins. These guys can play, and the atmosphere at these gigs is just tremendous.

So if you want to find us on any Sunday afternoon, we'll be in the park, near the bandstand.

Fab Video

I saw a link to this amazing video on Mac Thomson's Sandlander blog. Visually, fab. Quite a good chanson too.