The human mind works in mysterious ways. Well, mine does, anyway. Just yesterday, in a few small steps (some sideways), it linked the Spanish financial crisis to Cat Stevens.
I was out for a walk in a small provincial Spanish town, and I happened upon one of the many victims of the housing bubble burst: an enormous plot of land. all ready for urban development. Al the infrastructure was there: water, electricity, streets and streetlights, but no houses, and no traffic (the area was open to pedestrians, but closed off to cars). It didn't take me long to realize that the site would be the perfect place for my children to learn to roller-skate.
All along one side of the embryonic urban sprawl were earlier solutions to the same problem: the jam-packed city blocks of high-rise buildings from the seventies and eighties. And they got me thinking about "La Colmena" (The Beehive) by Camilo José Cela, put to celluloid by Mario Camus in 1982, and about a line from a song by Cat Stevens: "Well you crack the sky, scrapers fill the air. Will you keep up building higher until there is no more room up there?" Here's the original recording, from 1970:
And a more recent version:
The song is called "Where do the children play", and the answer to the title was right in front of me: the children play where the grand plans fail.
P.S.
True to form, I cannot help but think of other examples of songs about housing and children. such as Village Ghetto Land, in which Stevie Wonder sings "children play in broken glass", and Little Boxes by Malvina Reynolds, where the children grow up in boxes, then go to university where they are put in other boxes, but "come out all the same".
I was out for a walk in a small provincial Spanish town, and I happened upon one of the many victims of the housing bubble burst: an enormous plot of land. all ready for urban development. Al the infrastructure was there: water, electricity, streets and streetlights, but no houses, and no traffic (the area was open to pedestrians, but closed off to cars). It didn't take me long to realize that the site would be the perfect place for my children to learn to roller-skate.
All along one side of the embryonic urban sprawl were earlier solutions to the same problem: the jam-packed city blocks of high-rise buildings from the seventies and eighties. And they got me thinking about "La Colmena" (The Beehive) by Camilo José Cela, put to celluloid by Mario Camus in 1982, and about a line from a song by Cat Stevens: "Well you crack the sky, scrapers fill the air. Will you keep up building higher until there is no more room up there?" Here's the original recording, from 1970:
And a more recent version:
The song is called "Where do the children play", and the answer to the title was right in front of me: the children play where the grand plans fail.
P.S.
True to form, I cannot help but think of other examples of songs about housing and children. such as Village Ghetto Land, in which Stevie Wonder sings "children play in broken glass", and Little Boxes by Malvina Reynolds, where the children grow up in boxes, then go to university where they are put in other boxes, but "come out all the same".
No comments:
Post a Comment