& J: Joshua Bradley: Blog

So I was in Barcelona last week working with a creative director on a fairly simple portfolio site for him. I say fairly because it was actually pretty complicated as the budget & deadline (a week) were too tight to bring in other people or get any backend framework sorted out. So the whole thing had to be hard-coded(ish) page by page. And there was a lot of content- this guy was prolific. Seriously. Check out the site here.

Anyway, whilst there, I went to my first bullfight. OK, I’ve always been pretty ambivalent about that kind of stuff… ritualised killing seemed somehow unnecessary in the absence of ritualised life. Or somesuch. And the demographic who tend to approve of such stuff tend in my experience to be every bit as clichéd (4×4 at Waitrose, Victorian wallpaper patterned wellington boots, country retreat for the odd bank-holiday) as the bedreadlocked, badgewearing, soundbitten solipsist student classes who make up the bulk of the protest contingent.

And contingent there is- Barcelona has banned most of its bullfights: there is only one ring left. As we approach we are flooded in the roar of the protesters, a team of samba drummers punctuate the looping meter of a grand mob of dissident activists.

However, today the ring is packed out. One of the Toreadors, “El Juli” is apparently the best in the world, and we are in for a treat.

What happens next I can’t really think about. The fights are pretty messy, apparently, and the bulls are, it seems, gradually stabbed to death. Amazing animals, and some amazing displays of sheer nerve. But not an awful amount of grace. However, my back and legs went tense, and remained tense throughout. I was pretty much transfixed.

I suppose my genuine feeling is really one of slight mystification at the emotion this stuff brings out in people. It seems as if the lead protesters are just riding a PR wave to pick up the casually squeamish (a lot of people) and assign to them rather more intense viewpoints. A pretty standard method for padding out a small movement. But that makes me find the whole thing a little revolting- sure the bad guys use massive media agencies to cleverly manipulate information and sway public opinion, but should you really fight fire with fire? Won’t that just burn your house down? I don’t know.

It is clear that these bulls are seriously healthy (at first). I was taken to see ‘Our Daily Bread‘ recently. It is an amazing documentary about mechanised farming. I won’t tell you about it because you should see it. The bulls we eat are not even bulls. The ‘issue’ of 500-1000 bulls a year being killed in ritual fashion seems to pale in comparison to the issue of the hundreds of millions of bulls who’s entire lives are part of a production line. And that seems pale in comparison to the reality that it takes 5000 tons of water to produce 1 ton of beef (next to 1000 tons of water per ton of grain), we are currently depleting our finite subterranean aquifers at a rate of 160 billion tons per year, and the emerging middle classes in India and China (who will more than double the affluent population of the world) have beef on their shopping lists… Ho ho ho.

In 2007 I put this site together for a friend, the brilliant director Vanessa Caswill. I thought I would put it up here because I really like the site and her films. You can watch a couple of them on TVBomb if you have Joost. Enough shameless pluggery, sir. I bought the book, which I think is a Dutch grammar guide, at a bookshop in London a while ago. It reminds me of something. It actually has a title and stuff, but I tend to remove it, because it’s unsettling.

I made this a while ago, by dipping my hands in paint etc. It’s actually huge, but it only exists on computers. I need a big printer. Hands up anybody with a big printer… I’ll give you a special apple for the use of it. Oh- it was preparatory work for an album cover which never came to pass. My favourite type of thing.

These are from a recent photoshoot for Notion Magazine. The people are a French duo called John and Jehn whos music sounds like a combination of Sonic Youth and this special tune I used to hum when imagining the music of one of my little dogs, Pippen. This dog is now dead, and this alerted me to a poignancy perhaps intentional in its indie-music counterpart. It was a fun shoot, we had a beer and they played us a song! It was a Tuesday.