I must use a nickname for prosecution purposes: there is an arrest warrant pending over my bony head. You can call me Wilson.<\/p>\n
If this opening paragraph were to be a song, it could be Jurgen\u2019s Paape \u00abIn Time\u00bb. Unfortunately, it sounds more like Aphex Twin drilling Mahler with a jackhammer. Music, literature and Aikido were once the answer. Then Nora stopped breathing and all the answers became obliterated. I had no alternative: I had to die by the sword.<\/p>\n
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<\/b><\/h4>\nBarcelona, 1990\u2019s<\/b><\/h4>\n
I was young once. It was confusing and visceral. I thought I could write. Then I realised I could barely do it without embarrassing some of my heroes; hence I got a Degree in Journalism and shamed them all. My pal Manu got me my first gig as a movie critic for a trendy magazine printed in the Little Barcelona Hell during the late 1990s. Manu and I met inside a toilet. He managed to escape it.<\/p>\n
He set me up with an interview with the director of the toilet \u2014aka the magazine. She had an impossible name, looked like an alligator dressed in Prada, had a fluffy, flaming-red hairdo, and a seemingly stillborn kangaroo stuck to her side. I was too spellbound to be horrified. Inevitably, I asked about the dead mammal.<\/p>\n
She said it was not a kangaroo but a Louis Vuitton handbag \u2014almost the same thing. Then she said: \u00abTHIS IS THE MAGAZINE\u00bb<\/em>.<\/p>\n It was a disposable affair: 72 trendy pages issued monthly that you could get for free in clubs, bars, record stores\u2026 It included fashion editorials featuring underage, intoxicated and very thin Catalans wearing Mickey Mouse jumpers and sucking lollipops; plus stories about music, arts, cinema and a cultural agenda mapping all the coolest spots in town where fashion and music victims would hang out with their Mickey Mouse\u2019s jumpers and Adidas Gazelle on, while dipping their lollipops in their personal stacks.<\/p>\n The headquarters where the alligator smoked and plotted her magazine revolution were in El Born, a former working class settlement properly dismantled and reassessed before the Olympics, that became the most hip, gentrified part of town. The HQ was some stunning 400 square metres apartment with a huge waiting room broadcasting fashion and music channels I had never heard of.<\/p>\n It felt like strolling through a Scandinavian museum of modern art. I remember the sleek, dark glass tables in every meeting room, the abundance of gigantic interior plants, the mind-blowing vintage lamps, and the pornographic Gaudi-meets- Da-Vinci-tiled floors.<\/p>\n \u00abAll the furniture is by my favourite Norwegian interior designer\u00bb<\/em>, the director said.<\/p>\n I was still in college embarrassing my heroes, and, all of a sudden, I walked into the backdoor of journalism\u2026. THROUGH LOUIS VUITTON BACKSTAGE IN BCN!!!!!!!<\/p>\n I was lucky, wasn\u2019t I? I would be travelling in private jets in no time. The director\u2019s office was massive, filled with thousands of records, CDs, books and artworks. It felt like the Nazi\u2019s bunker for artistic confiscations.<\/p>\n She asked me to watch a movie called Will Hunting<\/i> or something, and to write the review. It was the story of two young idiots who could play chess and scrub toilets, and who shared the most annoying therapist in the history of cinema. At least I didn\u2019t pay to watch it. The downside is that I was not paid for writing the review either. (The private jet must wait, I told myself).<\/p>\n I wrote a convoluted text filled with words like \u00abhemorragia\u00bb and \u00abcrep\u00fasculo\u00bb. My heroes must have been disgusted. I would have fired myself if I were HER. I didn\u2019t know that using those two words was all you needed to become a \u201cculture\u201d journalist. The director was delighted with the review. She said I was hired (for free), and asked if I was ready for the next assignment. She wanted me to interview a band called Asian Dub Foundation. I hadn\u2019t learnt to say NO at that stage. I had read that Goethe only learnt to do so in his forties, although he probably never said yes to an unpaid gig.<\/p>\n But then again I was twenty and an ignorant: I had no clue about whom ADF were when my mouth opened and said:<\/p>\n \u201cMaybe: is it a commissioned gig?\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n The director knew that maybe meant yes, ignored the question, looked at her many shelves crammed with CDs, and picked the debut album of the band. She asked me to listen to it. I said thank you. Then she said: \u00abRECUERDA QUE ES DE HUELVA\u00bb<\/em> \u2014remember this CD has to come back to mum.<\/p>\n It was the first lesson I learnt as a journalist: never give back your working materials, no matter how many greedy bossy vipers you have to deal with. I was dumbfounded, nonetheless.<\/p>\n My years of professional journalistic deformation were shaped right before the invention of the infamous LOW COST culture, a ground-breaking, ruthless scheme designed to identify all the cheapskates in the world \u2014in order to punish them for being so. The director was a super low cost pioneer: she had eradicated the cost of everything except her salary, a pool of zeros that she would fill with cocaine, Norwegian wood and embroidered knickers while we (the free contributors) kept multiplying our labour per zero. Most of the time I spent enslaved by the platform I felt like Joaquin Blume, the tightest gymnast ever born in the Iberian-macho-peninsula, a self-extended acrobat well capable of sustaining the crucified posture for hours, months, years\u2026. I was earning the lowest low-cost salary (a neat, perfect zero) when the paws of the far right showed their wonderful disposition to inoculate my pen with cash. Their platform was a national newspaper and a freedom of expression guillotine \u2014except for our Friday magazine; a supplement whose existence went unnoticed for the CEO, one of the most sinister minds of the perpetuated Spanish Inquisition. They had a point, although they ignored that the alleged leftist newspapers they read, like El Pa\u00eds<\/i>, El Mundo<\/i> or La Vanguardia<\/i> were the main sewers were critical thinking and independent journalism morbidly choked. As of today, nothing has changed except for the income gap, an abyss of cheapskate writers falling perpetually through the Zero Hole. Most of them are also currently enslaved 24\/7 by ungrateful employers named Zuckerberg, Bezos or Musk who keep fracking up their cuntent for free.<\/p>\n I disposed of the stinky journalist corpse on the closest garbage dump I could find, and moved to Ireland to learn their language and become a literary translator. I was living in Dublin, had the funniest, loving partner, an office in town, a creative writing teaching gig, a book and an Aikido black belt underway, and a promising gallery owner increasingly interested in my homemade videos of rubbish glittering on the stream of the Liffey. Then I met the wrong law enforcer at the wrong time in a place that should not have been wrong. The agent was called Carl Murder, true fuckt.<\/p>\n\n\t\tSo So Low<\/b><\/h4>\n
\nIt was the era when Ryanair\u2019s staff would abuse you for being one of the many shameless passengers who chose humiliation instead of caring. Then came Zara, Amazon, IKEA and all the corpofucked, exploitative businesses that made you feel rich for buying cheap shit.
\nThe low cost invention was a freaking, data-fracking operation intended to document and identify those living below or parallel to the ZERO mental income line.<\/p>\n
\nThe gap between her throne and our gutter must have infuriated Marx, another hero we all embarrassed like proper young idiots.
\nInstead of mentioning any figure, the director said that HER magazine was a great platform and that HER contributors were the best, super talented, all destined to journalistic glory, including me, thanks to HER platform.<\/p>\n
\nI also felt like a nightmarish version of Tom Daley, a shaved up, underage body soundlessly spinning the air before realising that there is no swimming pool underneath the fucking platform. In the end Tom Daley never died and the platform worked to set me up with a job for a Franco\u2019s nostalgic newspaper in Madrid a year and a half later.<\/p>\n
\nMany Catalan friends stopped talking to me after I signed for the sons and brothers of the Spaniard dead dwarf.<\/p>\nThe End, Dublin 23rd<\/sup> of April 2019<\/b><\/h4>\n