En Madrid

Please mind the gap between Blogger and Wordpress... I have moved my blog over to Wordpress largely because you can browse my archive posts there, where you will also find future posts. The new address is: http://madrid.wordpress.com/ Please update your bookmarks.

Spent some time on the terrace of the pub in Villaviciosa the other day, the sign could do with some maintenance...

The windmills in Toledo are reconstructions, but for authenticity you can walk the same path as Don Quixote. I can also recommend the Nestle Cheesecake ice cream avalible from the in-windmill shop (Image from nestle.es)

Toledo has lots of flat streets which makes it ideal amongst other things for riding a Segway, there was a Segway Hire Shop and I had to have a go, I was scared I would fall off as it works only by weighting your body around to go back or forward, but as it was it was great fun.

We had a teacher come to do a special session in our 'Infografia y Multimedia' class, she was great at explaining everything very well, and I ended up with an animation that looks like it was maybe made by a 7 year old! Oh well...

Had another artist come and give a lecture today which I went to as part of my class. Christoph Draeger spoke English which was nice for me and his work was all about disasters, he built big models of disaster scenes and took photos of them and built giant jigsaw puzzles with thousands of pieces with pictures of disasters. The interesting thing was him talking about how is work was perceived after 9/11 when these images were saturated everywhere. Seems like he's gone off in a bit of a different direction to go make a film in Brazil...

I saw the Russian Film A Man With a Camera today at the Thyssen Museum. It was billed at the beginning as being experimental and it followed a sort of freeforrn documentary style. I couldn't really decide if it was just a Tour de force of Camera and Editing techniques (Which given it was made in 1929 wouldn't really be a bad thing) or a film with a real story. Certainly it had enough funny parts like crossfading the cameraman in a giant glass of beer to think that it had a good sense of humor more than just a demonstration of lots of cool techniques which were new for the time.