The Revolution may not be on television, but it is on other things

One can't help wondering whose retirement plan is best. It's on everyone's mind these days, right after nuclear war, confiscatory health care costs, a big fat liar in the White House, and the current climate of fear being propagated by alt-right websites. People, as the illustration below clearly shows, have always known what's up.

I can't help inspecting graffiti when I get the chance. So my pictures of wall art are the main thing I brought back from Barcelona, when I visited there seven years ago. There was a mood of independence, of the need to break away from hierarchy and superstates.

People have had it with faceless bureaucracy in any uniform. They want to be who they are, not who the state or statist media insists they are.

I loved this one because it's such a great portrait, but is also playfully political, rather than reverently so.

30,000 years ago in northern Spain and Southern France, men made self-portraits and carved what are considered fertility statuettes, raising humankind out of the dim epoch of gradual discovery, when a few lines had been etched on bones and shells, but not much else in the way of symbolic art was being made, at least not in a permanent form. This year, the president has taken us in the other direction, and graffiti artists are nothing if not sensitive to the zeitgeist. Many cave paintings were made in remote corners of elaborate caves, far from ordinary foot traffic. This one is out of the way, but not exactly hidden.

I appreciate that the artist here, on the wall outside Gaudi's Parc Guelle, uses shading to achieve a depth of field, in much the same way ancient artists drew their horses at Alta Mira, a few hundred miles to the west. Also, the sense of arrested motion achieved with the upraised foot could have been cribbed from ancient pigments on stone.

The skill level here is not quite the same, but there is a playful blending of human and fish anatomical detail. I see a Trump voter listening to Rush, transformed into a striped bass. Not Rush the shitty band, Rush the propagandist.

Jesse. 1988. The only political rally I've ever actually attended---as opposed to a protest---was Jackson's speech on the Mendocino Headlands. Third party oblivion is as American as mock apple pie. The Catalan separatists must have seen him as a positive force, judging by the presentation.

A lot of people are feeling this way these days, but they must have felt the same in Barcelona back then.