DESTINATION Ed Maklouf’s hood
INSPIRATION Kevin Parker hooks me up with a guy who imports the world’s craziest hats and we accidentally wander into a “happening.”
FROM Kevin XXXXXX
TO Angie Banicki
subject Re: 30 before 30
Angie,
Here’s old itinerary from a trip to Barcelona that has a bunch of info on it. Also, contact my buddy Ed Maklouf when you get to Barcelona, he’s one of the most interesting guys I’ve met.
KP
The bus turistica seems a little cheesy, but it is actually a great way to see the city and go to all of the big tourist attractions. You can hop on and off at anytime, so it is a good way to maximize your time in getting to the main sites.
Make sure you see as much of gaudi’s work as possible. Parque Guell is my personal favorite, and casa mila and casa battlo are also worth a trip. I’m sure you will check out las ramblas, but off of the strip are barrio gotico and the latin quarter, which are cool neighborhoods to walk around. Also off of las ramblas is la boqueria, which is a huge outdoor market. There are a few restau- rants in there (think outdoor diners) that have some great tapas. Porto olympico is pretty touristy, but near the water if you want to walk around. The picasso museum is cool.
If you can go to a soccer game, definitely do it. FC barcelona (barca) is one of the proudest and most famous clubs in europe and their stadium holds over 100,000. This is a religious experi- ence. If they are not playing espanyol is the other team in town (like the mets to barca’s yankees).
I know you said you wanted to go to/near the beach. Sitges is a little artsy town that is a 35 minute train ride from barcelona. They have a film festival in the fall, and it is a pretty relaxed place.
From talking to my friend Kevin, I thought he sent me to meet his best buddy. But when Ed and I met in Barcelona, I got the real story. “Kevin and I only met once, in London. I think it was at a late night party in a basement somewhere!”
That’s the beauty of connection, though. It can happen in a moment. Ed became quite the character in my Barcelona story and has since become a friend for life. He’s an entrepreneur and a risk taker, always with another new idea. He’s the founder of a Barcelona startup called Siine, trying to build a better keyboard for intuitive texting. Ed later enthusiastically told me about his idea to import very strange, tall, striped cone-shaped hats. Ed was nothing like I could have imagined. He was a skinny white dude with long hippy hair—no Spaniard at all. When we met, he was nervous about making sure he provided a good moment for me. I tried to calm him down about it. “Meeting you, my friend’s friend in Barcelona, is special enough!” But that just seemed to add more pressure.
When he learned where I had been so far—an exhilarating run through Guell Park high above the city, the Ritz Barcelona (where they named a gin cocktail after me)—he decided that it was time to take me off the beaten path.
“I’m going to take you to a restaurant on the Bohemian side of town,” he told me. What crazy part of town we ended up in, I don’t know. The restaurant was outside, and it didn’t feel like a restaurant at all. It felt like friends cooking BBQ outside.
We had barely settled in when I noticed something happening. Maybe 30 feet away there was a blank wall, and two guys covering it in white paper.
Ed waved it off as nothing, but I said, “No, I think something’s about to happen.”
Sure enough, a guy got up and said in Spanish, very grandly, “I want to welcome you all here!” There were only about seven of us in the whole place.
We watched as the two artists both lit joints. Then they welcomed their parents to the event and made a little speech. Ed and I looked at each other, amazed.
Finally they started drawing. They drew huge circles, and then started filling them in. Walkers passed by the work-in-process. Were they part of the art? One man stopped, picked up chalk, and helped fill in one of the circles. The men patted his back and he walked on. They continued drawing.
Next they drew a little man, and the man’s shadow, and connected it to the circle.
Was it abstract? Hula hoops? Worlds colliding?
I started to wish I was smoking the pot. People walking through the restaurant area were as confused as we were. Ed seemed embarrassed at this random, not all that impressive art show, but I loved that it was bizarre and fun and completely unexpected. It didn’t have to be Gaudi—it was alive, and that was enough.
Ed was reluctant to engage with the artists, and even more reluctant when I wanted to get a picture. But I persisted and the artists were thrilled. Thanks to little American me, they now had an international audience for their work. I still have no idea what they were really up to, except that the circles were definitely worlds. But their enthusiasm was so contagious that even Ed opened up to it.
STREET ART IN BARCELONA
After the death of Franco in the 1970s, Barcelona evolved into a bohemian, cultural city, creating a place and environment where the people could reclaim their space, their culture, and language. Over the next decades, the city flourished with street art freedom: graffiti along the city walls, music in every corner. During this urban cultural renaissance, artists created a public gallery where the people could enjoy a city which is flourishing with artistic expression. The street art of this time often provoked playful interchanges or posed political, economic, or cultural questions. There was a public conversation between the artists and the people in the streets. – from The Mapping Barcelona Art Project
BIO >> KEVIN PARKER
Talent manager (Rain Management Group) and TV producer Kevin Parker seems to have the special gift of being omnipresent. He’s been a staple at every birth - day party, every award season event, every Sundance shindig
I’ve gone to for years. I don’t know how he does it, but it’s impressive, and that’s coming from a professional goer-outer herself.
TRIPPING POINT
Art is most fun when it’s least pretentious. Shift your attention to the artist, and let their enthusiasm carry you.
YOU ARE READING
30 Before 30
Non-Fiction30 Before 30. Thirty days in Europe. Thirty inspired moments of adventure to live it up before my 30th birthday. Just the idea of it gave me purpose. Here was a reminder that I could choose a new path, even if it was only for 30 days. A little backg...
