Greetings from rainy Barcelona. With the rains has come a high water table and every morning we are greeted with a fresh dose of our beloved neighbors’ toilet flushes bubbling out of the drain and into our patio. These are the joys of living in an old city. Those of you who know me best know my deep dislike of scatological humor and that I do my best to steer clear of Adam Sandler films and their ilk. But, I find myself succumbing to a strange Catalan preoccupation. You see, in the province of Catalunya there is a historic obsession with this most unfortunate bodily function. The most common Christmas figurine after the baby Jesus, for example, is a man bending over and doing #2. The exterior walls of Salvador Dali’s museum are decorated with a pattern of mauve, sculptured fixtures resembling dog-doo, and every self-respecting Catalan artist pays homage in his or her art in some way. Of course, our neighbors regularly complain that the government is not doing enough to keep the streets clear of both human and animal waste, even though every night the city is cleaned and scrubbed by an army of trashmen in their fluorescent green uniforms. Likewise, there is no lack of utopian visions and programs for human betterment. The human problem is not a lack of effort to clean things up around here, but that we keep on pissing and crapping all over the place. I’ll leave it to you to make the theological translation. Read the rest of this entry »

Giving Voice
Last time I wrote I described an evangelistic tool we were developing called a University Survival Kit. After working till the eleventh hour, some nine thousand kits are now in the hands of university students in the cities of Malaga and Barcelona. Here in Barcelona we asked our Christian friends to save us from having to assemble the five thousand kits ourselves and sweetened the deal with the promise of Chocolate Chip Cookies. A throng of eager students answered the call of the sweet tooth within and we spent the evening inserting CD’s and sticking stickers, laughing and praying. It was exciting for us to see their excitement at being a part of this initiative on their campuses. That next week the Campus ministry manned the metro stations and handed the kits out as students emerged from the subterranean metro tunnels and into the light. The kits were received enthusiastically, and it is exciting to think that so many students have the Gospel in their hands. Still, it is impossible to know just what affect the kits have had in the hearts and minds of most of the university students who received them. We have received relatively little feedback from the website, but the responses we have received have been very positive. Some want to know more about Jesus, and some are Christians who want to be involved with our ministry. This is our first effort of this kind and we are listening carefully so that we can learn how best to speak to the longings of Spanish university students. Read the rest of this entry »

How can I describe the last months? I spent last summer hiking through the breathtaking hinterlands of Northern Spain and running a refuge in a cow town amongst throngs of friends, relatives, pilgrims, and neighbors. This year, as the rest of the Agape staff headed for the hills, I retreated into my cave in Barcelona. For two months I have been working away day and night in relative obscurity. It is an awesome thing to be alone with one’s self. Not a few wise people have suggested that the reason we busy ourselves and fill all the nooks and crannies of our lives with noise and entertainment is because we dread our own company. Well, my own company has not been all tea and pleasantries. In these many undistracted hours I have dwelt at length with my will’s unrelenting equivocation, with ulcer –inducing anxiety about rent and bills, and with feelings of inadequacy from pushing up against the limits of my creative abilities. My soul is worn ragged, and yet… and yet God has made himself present in a new and reassuring way and given me a taste of that peace that passes understanding. This tumultuous time for my inner life has turned out to be a rich blessing. So, what have I been working on these many days? Read the rest of this entry »

LIFE : Our lives continue to be interesting. Recently, on our way home, we passed a crowd of drunk, English soccer fans (”hooligans”), brawling as part of the traditional post-game celebration. Exiting the plaza, we passed one such stumbling drunk being “helped along” by four or five of our neighbors as they rifled through his pockets. I stopped and yelled at them to leave him alone, causing one of them to charge at me muttering and gesturing something to the effect of, “stay out of this, or else.” Considering the situation in haste — his wallet or my health — I walked on. My coworker, Nate, recently interfered in another robbery provoking the thief to come at him with the sharp end of a broken bottle. Just yesterday we confronted a neighbor who was slapping and kicking his girlfriend at our front door. Actually, we rarely feel threatened by the criminal element in our neighborhood; they know us and they leave us alone. They leave us alone, that is, as long as we do not interfere. Read the rest of this entry »

A belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. I arrived in Barcelona on November 26 and as of today Alas eStudio is more or less a reality. My time so far has been truly remarkable.

La Ciutat Vella
They call our district La Ciutat Vella, “the beautiful city”. In our beautiful city, the streets are littered with trash, mined with dog doo, and streaming with urine. The walls are crumbling and windows are boarded-up. Nearly every door and wall is covered in graffiti. One especially entertaining local graffiti artist scents his trail with an enormous baby pacifier. We’re making efforts to eradicate the graffiti on our own doorpost, a barely legible message to “Samantha“, undoubtedly sprayed there in a moment of passion. During one experiment with a chemical paint remover, a clutch of neighborhood kids seized our cleaning supplies and began scrubbing away at the graffiti. They were only making it worse, but it struck me as a really sweet kind of Sesame Street moment. I kept up as best I could, teaching them how best to scrub, supplying each of them with new steel brushes, and generally trying to minimize the damage. Well, before long, sponges and brushes and splotches of paint in their wake, they demanded payment. When I offered a gift instead, they weren’t interested, running around the studio till they found my change and snagged a good Portion, earning them the title, “little punks“. Read the rest of this entry »

If you ever need to film blood, do not, I repeat, do not use real blood. Even if a friend of a friend, for reasons unknown, happens to have a jar of blood to donate for this purpose, resist the temptation to use it, however great the desire to be authentic. It turns out that the stench of stale blood is fearsome. In the end, after experimenting with all kinds of off-the-shelf liquids, I discovered a coffee concoction that worked to great effect. I thought at the time how easy it was as an artist to forget the real tragedy of one’s subject matter amidst technical issues, while pushing pixels or playing with flour and red food coloring. The thought returned as I watched September 11th’s cinematic terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. We cannot fast-forward or eject the tragic fact that the world is not at peace with God, and therefore not at peace with each other. This was one of many lessons learned as I struggled to finish my first “original” short film in time for the Damah Film Festival (damah.com). I worked aimlessly and intermittently at first, and then finally, overcoming my intimidation, tirelessly and purposefully through a week of sleepless nights. In the end, “Speechless” — a tragic history of the world in paint and photos — was, let us say, not ready for primetime. Out of time, I sent it rough and unfinished. So, it was quite a surprise to learn recently that of 243 entries, my film was one of nineteen to be nominated for an award at the film festival in Seattle in October. I’ll do my best to break a leg. Read the rest of this entry »

Our lives are at once bitter and sweet, beautiful and horrible. Louis Armstrong whispers “O What a Wonderful World” while another Rages Against the Machine. Sixpence pens songs about “This Beautiful Mess” and Alan Paton puts his “Cry for the Beloved Country” to paper. They all speak truly, for this is the human condition. And it is the Christian story alone that begins to make sense of this profound paradox. My recent short film, “Speechless”, attempts to recount the story of our world, a work of art created in beauty by a good God, but perverted and corrupted by its inhabitants. We look around and see that this is true. The Good News is that God is restoring His people to beauty. The arts have a unique ability to retell this story to a generation that is wary of the Church and its checkered past. Indeed, in our experience in Spain, the arts have found eyes and ears to listen where other expressions of the Gospel have failed. I have also been encouraged in this process by the immediate enthusiasm for the studio amongst fellow post moderns, both Christian and not. Read the rest of this entry »

I sit amongst a group of Spanish pilgrims tending their blisters and sore muscles. Over the top of my laptop I see a dirt road winding through several stone barns and homes. Cows lounge, cats nap, and flies — oh so many flies! — buzz about. I try hard not to be intimidated when neighbors walk by with a foot-long machete in hand. Maria passes with a weighty bale of hay on her back, her beaming smile undiminished by her seventy-three years. This is Ligonde. During the month of July my digital lifestyle finds itself squarely stuck in the roundabout days of rural life. I am working at 4800bps on a radio modem from the Fuente del Peregrino (Fount of the Pilgrim), a refuge for pilgrims traveling the Camino de Santiago. Last night the house showed the Jesus Film, served dinner to twenty pilgrims, and with the talent on hand, performed an impromptu concert of opera, praise, and a ditty or two. It is a wonderful place and my mission is to capture its ambience and good feeling on the web. This will prove to be very difficult short of new technology with olfactory abilities. One must smell Ligonde to know Ligonde. Read the rest of this entry »

Today has been an especially good day in Spain. As usual I am writing from a café, with my café con leche in hand. Just a moment ago while clearing a litter of twenty empty glasses in front of me the waitress made a crack about me having drunk quite a bit and having made quite a mess. Not only did I get the joke, but I managed to respond that, “Yeah, I was really thirsty.” Humor is especially difficult in a second language and it was an encouraging sign that I’m understanding. Earlier this evening, for a change of pace, I walked to a Lebanese and then an Italian restaurant near my apartment. (It is wonderfully ironic and indicative of our times that I find myself going to an Italian or Chinese restaurant when I want to feel a little more at home.) Both were closed. Instead I ended up at a previously undiscovered Spanish restaurant and dined on two fantastic Spanish specialties, gazpacho and paella. At work I put the finishing touches on the website for Agape’s national video and photography contest, “El Mundo Atraves de Tus Ojos” (”The World Through your Eyes” at comoloves.com), made significant strides in learning our film-editing software, and tutored a Spanish coworker on how to build a webpage.

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When you tell people that you are studying philosophy, their first question is almost always the same: “What are you going to do with that?” I usually resist the temptation to hold forth on the intrinsic good of education. Instead, I answer that for some time I have had a pipe dream (so to speak), a plan B, and a plan C. (Fallback plans are something you need with a degree in philosophy.) Plan C would be to become a professional web designer, something I have been doing part-time for several years. Plan B would be to pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy in the hopes of some day teaching at the university level. The pipe dream has always been a little hard to describe. About three years ago when I was living in Spain I started dreaming of ways in which I could combine my love for understanding and for ideas with my creative impulse. I had ambitious ideas of films and web magazines and a superhero comic, but opportunities such as these aren’t exactly listed in the Classifieds. Nonetheless, for at least the next six months I am going to have the privilege of pursuing this pipe dream.

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