From: peter.churchill@rose.com (peter churchill)
Subject: ***Congratulations
Organization: Rose Media Inc, Toronto, Ontario.
Distribution: can
Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1992 15:52:16 GMT
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Date Entered: 08-12-92 10:46

In Message <WARKENT.92Aug11104155@ltisun9.epfl.ch> Ken Warkington 
wonders:

| <comment on Silken deleted then comment on closing show:>
| I wonder how many Canadians were shocked
| by the demonic imagery?  I felt as if the choreographer had spent
| too much time in the El Prado museum staring at the Breughels.

Perhaps younger Canadians who have never been outside their own border 
may have been, but anyone who has travelled to Central or South 
America or to Spain itself wouldn't have noticed anything out of the 
ordinary. Spain is the natural habitat of the emotional grotesque 
combined with the extraordinarily picaresque -- all founded on an 
uncompromising _dignitas_.

Why go back to Brueghel when you have Goya. In our own time -- or at 
least mine -- we had the horrors of the Civil War and many of us were 
fortunate enough to have visited the MUMA in New York and seen 
Picasso's _Guernica_ before it went back to Spain. 

Spain is the home of Torquemada and Cervantes -- Don Quixote and the 
Auto de Fe. Even the architecture of Gaudi seen so much in cutaways 
during the Olympic Games TV coverage carried the same message. 
Especially of Catalonia and Barcelona. Read Llorca and listen to de 
Falla -- its all there.

I have lived both in Spain and Mexico and Spain, of all the placed I 
have been, hold second place in my heart to Canada. In Mexico, during 
the '68 Olympics I ended up in prison for writing about the massacre 
of students in Tlatalelco rather than high jumps but, strangely 
enough, survived it all without too much outrage to my Western sense 
of democratic civil liberties. I was scared shitless, of course, but 
in the end, probably from having read some of the introspective stuff 
of Octavio Paz, my indignation was tempered by some understanding.

I shall risk running on a little long but ending with a peek into the 
true soul of Spain by quoting from the opening of _El Cordobes_ by 
Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre:

"Spain was a nation condemned by the Pyrenees to live her formative 
centuries forlornly alone.  While Europe had spawned a Renaissance she 
had been forced to forge a nation by driving her Arab conquerors from 
her soil. As her neighbours to the north grasped for the first prizes 
of mercantilism, she assigned herself the more spiritual mission of 
Catholicizing the world and had squandered an empire for the Cross.  Her 
harsh, forbidding land stood higher, bore less water, and exacted, for 
each living thing it sustained, a greater toll of human sweat and 
toil than any other corner of Europe.
 
"From that adversity and isolation had come a proud and ardent people 
-- a people born to hardship, indifferent to suffering, possessing a 
fine disregard for death....."

And CTV's pathetic coverage of the games missed it all, giving us a 
commercialized running commentary more fitting for a home-town soap 
opera.

Regards: *PC*  <peter.churchill@rose.com>  -- Toronto
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