When I was a teenager in Ireland, I made a friend from Spain whom I’ll call B. He was easy to get along with, generous and fun loving with a wide grin and a stocky figure. He was a bon vivant, drawn to alcohol and excess, and took a stereotypically Iberian delight in catcalling women. He often regaled my friends with stories about his favorite prostitutes from his old neighborhood. One day he asked me how many I had visited in my life. I shook my head, grinning, “None, I wouldn’t do that!” He looked baffled. “Why not? How will you learn?”

B was eccentric, and had strong views on the world. I remember laughing with my friends at his pronouncements on women: “French girls are the most beautiful in the world,” he would say in his thick Spanish accent, “They have perfect body, perfect clothes, perfect hair, but face just a leetle bit ugly” – he then kissed his fingers – “That is perfection!” This approach to aesthetics extended to architecture as well, and seemed to constitute a general theory for him. He once explained why Sicily was the most beautiful place in the world using a similar rubric: “Everything in south of Italy is classic, elegant, and then you look and is just a bit broken. So perfect!”

My fellow schoolmates viewed him as a harmless oddity, and paid little attention to the underlying character of his views. Since he and I both happened to be foreigners where we went to school, I spent much more time with him than the others did. On weekend nights out together, he would get riotously drunk and tell me about his life back home.

He’d grown up in an upper middle class household in Madrid with parents who’d prospered under Franco. Their apartment was not far from the city center, and was within hearing distance of the protests and disturbances taking place periodically in the main square. Once, a bomb planted by Basque separatists exploded directly outside their home. He threw his hands in the air describing the helplessness he felt on that day, trying to comfort his mother while his father kept watch on the commotion outside.

As I got to know him better, he opened up more and more, regaling me with tales of his hometown with visible enthusiasm. On the weekend, he and his friends would wear matching bomber jackets, jeans and boots. They would sit and drink in bars where the jukebox played only traditional and patriotic music. Some of his older friends would share the latest stories of fights they had in the street and protesters they had frightened. Later they would re-enter the street in a rowdy mass, looking for trouble. B spoke with pride about these friends; he believed they were performing an important social function.

I began to gather that B felt a distinct sense of disappointment, bordering on despair, when looking at the state of modern Spanish society. In his eyes, Spain had been taken over by liberals and businessmen, who cared only for their own individual comforts and new opportunities to make money. No one in power was looking out for the interests of the nation as a whole anymore. Spain was therefore becoming weak, which emboldened the nation’s enemies. It was up to the youth in the street to show that Spain would not just roll over and accept its increasing domination by immigrants, leftists and foreign bankers.

Inevitably, the internal logic of this narrative led him to tell me lurid tales of the infinite malevolence of Moroccans and other Arabs. Supposedly they saw themselves as superior to the working Spanish, because the state provided them with the means to live. They acted like conquerors, taking what they wanted, construing Spain’s generosity as a sign of weakness. Apparently, this even led them to rob Spaniards at knifepoint in the street, killing them afterward.

At this point I shook my head, saying that I didn’t believe him, and he shrugged. “That is why I like you,” he said. “You do not agree with me, but you listen to my point of view.”

When he admitted that some of his friends were neo-Nazis, I said that I didn’t think we could be friends anymore. He quickly backtracked, telling me that they were more like acquaintances, and that he personally had no problem with anyone of a different race than him. “You are Jewish, no?” he asked me. I shook my head. “I like the Jews; I think they are very clever,” he said helpfully. For two weeks I avoided him, which noticeably hurt his feelings.

As time went on, I sought his company less and less, and began interrogating his views more acutely when the conversation drifted in a certain direction. Though his idolization of Franco remained unshaken, he was ready to admit when pressed that his hero had some faults. “Yes, Franco did some bad things; he killed many people. But in the end he was fighting for his country. Don’t forget that Franco built Spain!”

Supposedly Franco had returned from Morocco and single-handedly transformed Spain from a poor country into a modern one. If it weren’t for Franco, so the story went, Spain would be communist or anarchist today – and that dreadful possibility was increasing again.

Eventually B went back to Spain, and I never saw him again. By the time he left, we’d drifted enough that we didn’t even say goodbye.

_____

When people use the word “counterculture,” they’re usually referencing musical or aesthetic movements like punk, hip-hop, or even “indie,” all of which I would sooner call sub-cultures. My yearlong acquaintance with B gave me a different sense of the word, which remains with me still. His words sketched a picture of what it might mean to belong to something that sets itself in direct opposition to the dominant culture, that is not content merely to sit introspectively on the periphery, but rather speaks openly of replacing what it doesn’t accept.

B would always tell me “Fascist means uh, how you would say, ‘conservative,’ where you come from.” I listened to his words, but I was not convinced.

As it happens, I remain a fan of bomber jackets, though I’ll leave mine at home if I ever visit Spain.

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Here’s what I’ve been thinking:

To suggest that we are somehow harming the Earth, that we have a responsibility to the planet as we are its stewards, is really the same thing as saying: We are privileged on this planet, distinct from it, and hence are free to exhaust and consume all of its many splendored bounty. These are two sides of the same coin.

I’d like to change the coin, if I may.

The Earth, I believe, is indifferent. Absolutely, mercilessly indifferent. The Earth doesn’t care what the ozone is, whether there’s more or less carbon dioxide or plastic. Certain plants and animals might, of course, but the Earth per se? Nope. It doesn’t give a flying fuck.

To imagine that humans are somehow special, and distinct, is (partially) what breeds our contempt for our environs.

What if we shift the very terms of how we think about ourselves, collectively, on this planet? What if we no longer express a concern for this or that species or for this thing we call the environment and, instead, focus on our own living?

The problems I, for one, have with our food industry is not that it pillages the planet. It’s that it makes my life sucky: shitty food that makes me feel shitty is shitty.

The problems I have with rampant global capitalism is multifold and has nothing whatsoever to do with my concern over the spotted owl or the dolphin. My problem is that I hate being served by some bored, indifferent 18 year old making minimum wage. I want to exchange money and services with my neighbors; I want to feel I’m giving to someone good who, in turn, is giving me something good. The anonymity of the global market translated into the anonymity of the so-called local Sears is bone chilling.

The problem, then, is not with how we treat the Earth. It’s with how we treat ourselves. We work 40, 50, 60, 70 hours a week. And thanks to microcomputing, we work all the time. All the time. There is no leisure, there is no pleasure.

And rage — and, of course, impotence (why are there ads for Viagra during prime time?) — runs rampant. Every time I’m out driving — every time — I have to negotiate a plethora of deranged assholes rushing here and there, speeding up to tailgate me, honking, running lights. This is not a sign of a healthy life.

And this — these day to day exchanges for coffee, groceries, driving — is the environment. Literally. I don’t want to give my money to save the Amazon rain forest. I want to not have to work 70 hours a week just to break even.

And if everyone were just to slow down, well then, perhaps we’d stop raping the trees and the ground. Perhaps then we would have less need for the oil we are so concerned about.

But as is, the very terms of environmentalism are constitutive of the precise problem said movement nominally serves. To focus on oil is to focus on the wrong thing; it is to focus on what the oil companies focus on, what the car companies focus on, what Amazon and UPS and Boeing focus on.

The environmental drive to conserve and preserve resources is misguided. It is to be duped by the CEOs and Wall Street.

The focus should not be oil or plants or dolphins but the day to day pleasure of human beings. And then everything else will fall into place.

Imagine all the money and resources and policy that are dumped into the so-called environmental movement all of sudden going to making day to day life for human beings more pleasurable. Imagine that rather than saving the whales, we save computer programmers, marketers, sales people from having their lives exhausted by the inane, insane, demands to work all the time. Imagine that we make medicine actually driven by concern for health and not how Pfizer’s stock performs.

Imagine that we put all our collective resources — our architects and economists, our do-gooders and our legislators — towards making life a pleasurable undertaking ripe with delicious, fresh food; with slow sex; with happy children who are not stressed out by standardized tests; with doctors who take the time to listen and heal; with roads filled with courteous, safe drivers; with movie theaters where popcorn eating is verboten.

Now that’s an environmental movement I could get behind.

This is an album of strange pain. The cover artwork says so itself, just gaze into it: a blurry image of a naked woman tied up on a bed.    Are you telling me this is a woman as a lover?  Who is this girl?  Is this punishment?  Some kind of  sadomasochism?  What is happening?

What we (seem) to have here is a collection of love songs gone astray due to unfathomable violence, identity confusion, and self-loathing. They are racy, militant recordings mostly about hellish experiences. The lyrics are dirty and suck like black holes. Often, the titles speak for themselves:

• “In Lust You Can Hear the Axe Fall”
• “Guantanamo Canto”
• “You’re Pregnant, You’re Dead”

Even when names appear harmless they merely disguise the perverting and machinating minds behind them; take for example, track #7 “Black Keyboard”:

A child is nothing without hate.
Be certain he feels his love is trash.

All of this is sonically complemented by energetic, manic contrasts. These sounds are appropriately beautiful, as well as disturbing; the range is alarming, the blending fantastical ––

Like in the last song, “Gayle Lynn”, that operatically belches. Only to churn, then to talk; only to squall: lulling and laving thousands of emotions into one master, all-encompassing expression. Remorse, ebullience, curvaceously vexing ––

This is Xiu Xiu, this is Women as Lovers.  This is a fly recording, something worth purchasing and loving for years and years.