Que se preparen

Repito, vamos a poner 9 millones de lámparas led. Va haber 1.478 motivos de iluminación, eso que se llama guirnaldas, pues hay 1.478. Va haber 1.000 arcos de iluminación, va haber bolas de 12 metros de diámetro, vamos a iluminar 325 árboles, eh eh eh, esto es el no va más; vamos a decorar 13 fachadas; vamos a iluminar de forma simbólica 2 grandes árboles de 11 metros, y además 28 árboles de 4 a 5 metros; y además vamos poner un rótulo presidiendo la ciudad en el Ayuntamiento de 108 metros cuadrados. Bueno, que sepan los alcaldes de Londres, de Tokyo, de Nueva York, la alcaldesa de París y el alcalde de Berlín que vamos a ser el no va más. Bueno, ya no cito Madrid y Barcelona porque eso se nos quedan allá pequeñitos, al lado. Y entonces, que se preparen, porque yo iré a ver al ministro de Investigación, que saben ustedes que fue astronauta, y le preguntaré cómo se verían las luces de Vigo desde el satélite, desde arriba, desde aquella zona, porque van a ser las navidades top de este planeta.
¡Cuánto nos van a envidiar en cuántos sitios! Envidia cariñosa, yo sé que es una envidia cariñosa que nos tienen, porque ya todos estos colegas míos, alcaldes y alcaldesas, ya saben que en cuestiones de luces de Navidad, y en tantas y tantas cosas, somos los mejores del mundo.


Abel Caballero, alcalde de Vigo, 13 de septiembre de 2018.

Supersaturant blue

LA in January, though, turns out to be plenty Lynchian in its own right. Surreal/banal juxtapositions and interpenetrations are everyplace you look. The cab from LAX has a DDS machine attached to the meter so you can pay the fare by major credit card. Or there’s my hotel’s lobby, which is filled with beautiful Steinway piano music, except when you go over to put a buck in the piano player’s snifter or whatever it turns out there’s nobody playing, the piano’s playing itself, but it’s not a player piano, it’s a regular Steinway with a weird computerized box attached to the underside of its keyboard; the piano plays 24 hours a day and never once repeats a song. My hotel’s in what’s either West Hollywood or the downscale part of Beverly Hills; two clerks at the registration desk start arguing the point when I ask where exactly in LA we are. The argument goes on for an absurdly long time with me just standing there.
My hotel room has unbelievably fancy and expensive French doors that open out onto a balcony, except the balcony’s exactly ten inches wide and has an iron fence with decorations so sharp-looking you don’t want to get anywhere near it. I don’t think the French doors and balcony are meant to be a joke. There’s an enormous aqua-and-salmon mall across the street, very upscale, with pricey futuristic escalators slanting up across the mall’s exterior, and yet I never in three days see a single person a- or descend the escalator; the mall is all lit up and open and seems totally deserted. The winter sky seems smogless but unreal, its blue the same supersaturant blue as Blue Velvet’s opening’s famous sky.
LA has a big city’s street musicians, but here the musicians play on median strips instead of on the sidewalk or subway, and patrons throw change and fluttering bills at them from their speeding cars, many with the casual accuracy of long practice. On the median strips between the hotel and David Lynch’s sets, most of the street musicians were playing instruments like finger-cymbals and citterns.
Fact: in my three days here for Premiere magazine I will meet two (2) different people named Balloon.


David Foster Wallace, David Lynch keeps his head.