trippy triptych

The Garden of Earthly Delights

Hieronymus Bosch

cory and i are back from madrid after a fairly grueling 18+ hours of travel. on the way into philly there was some serious turbulence and we saw at least one girl run to the bathroom to toss her cookies.  cory was kind enough to offer up her bizarre water cuppie (served in a pudding package) that came with our vegetarian meals.  the week in madrid was incredibly busy and provocative.  it was a unique experience to witness firsthand the inner working and politics of an official UN conference.  the result is a 30 page Madrid Action Plan that will be disseminated by UNESCO outlining the metrics and directions for biosphere reserves over the next six years.  

most meetings took the form of an uber-democratic town hall meeting format, with an open mic period for anyone to provide input (even in the main auditorium events with approximately 800 attendees).    i was particularly struck by some of the bizarre comments coming from ArabMAB (the arab regional group of reserves).  i was shocked to hear the opening comments from the representative of Qatar who suggested that oil extraction and mining is synonymous with the principles biosphere reserves.  do i smell oil money?? just to confirm i'm no conspiracy theorist, he whispered briefly at the end of his presentation that shell corporation funded all of his research.  ha!  

during the ICC (intergovernmental coordinating committee) one fellow from egypt expressed outrage at the informal format of the meetings.  when the biannual ICC elections began he revealed that he had a letter from the highest levels of the Egyptian government mandating that he be elected as President of the ICC. the entire room went up in laughter.  he proceeded to take the mic and nominate himself for every available position, despite being repeatedly told that this is a violation of the ICC bylaws.  ultimately, the rep from the Congo was elected is what seems to have been a predetermined process as he received unanimous support.  i was a bit disillusioned by this scripted process and actually respected the egyptian and also a vietnamese rep who managed to stir things up a little bit.  there is so much more to say about the week long conference, but i don't think i have the patience to write it all down.

cory and i managed to find some amazing veggie restaurants and bars.  we went to a place called gruta 77, a local venue that has live shows EVERY day. we saw two bands the night before leaving, one of with was very good - Katemöss.  it was basically the spanish version of death from above 1979.  we went to the Prado museum and saw the above painting amongst many others. bosch and goya were my favorite. goya went through a very dark phase (i imagine related to the proliferation of the black plague?) and produced a series of frightening, predominately black-colored paintings depicting maniacal hordes of people. consider that the garden of earthly delights (above) by bosco was painted in 1500! as my friend gustavo says (in mildly broken english), "i cannot believe he was not on fire for this".  check out a higher resolution version if you can find it and i think you will see what he means.