Barcelona has a couple of large music festivals in the spring. The largest is Sonar, which takes over *both* of the FIRAs, including the gigantic one that Mobile World Congress just moved to in 2013. It includes a range of activities. Another is “Primavera Sound,” a multi-stage, multi-day event that covers an immense area of renovated waterfront on the northern end of Barcelona. The day we went to Primavera the shows started at noon or so and continued until 5:30 am the next morning. This being Barcelona, there are tons of shows schedule for 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 am. This being an odd and cold winter, it was jackets and fleeces and hats to fend off the cold wind from the water and prepare for the threat of rain.
Sometime while waiting for the 4am shows to start my husband and I wandered through the vendor stalls. It was odd — other than food, drink and a huge number of cigarettes (it is still very surprising to me, still a Californian at heart, to see how much smoking is a part of daily life here), the only item for purchase were all small print runs of posters, mostly band and venue posters. It was fun to see: there were no mass produced items, and so we saw the return of serious, low-volume speciality printing.
One set of prints caught our eye — it was a set of eyes, not a musical print but interesting. Here they are:
For those of you who are familiar with Terri Prachett’s “Only You Can Save Mankind” these remind me of the captain, although her color palate is different.
We ended up in an instant, totally comfortable conversation with the proprietor of this stall. As we talk I am repeatedly drawn to a particular poster, very ornate, for some reason I couldn’t quite place. Here’s what it looks like:
After a while we learn the proprietor of the stall is from Berkeley, CA. That explains it — I was born in Berkeley, grew up in the town next door, went to college and grad school in Berkeley, understand the vibe and often like the people.
Eventually it’s time for our show to start and so he, his wife, my husband and I say our “we’ll-come-by-and-visit-you-once-we-move-back-to-California” good-buys. We get along so well he pulls out his good, special business card. Immediately I see it says “monkey.” I say “there’s a lot of monkeys in the world.”
He responds “Yes, I made a JaegerMonkey t-shirt for Mozilla a while back.” My husband and I stop, stunned. Our son wears his JaegerMonkey t-shirt regularly (actually, it started off as my t-shirt but we both realized immediately it would become his.) There is JaegerMonkey inspired artwork, album covers and even music floating around our house, thanks to the kids who have been drawn to the JaegerMonkey t-shirt. On a recent trip to the coast one of my son’s friends spent the trip making an 8-bit, mine-craft like JaegerMonkey image ….
My husband points to the small Firefox button he has pinned to his jacket and describes my role. The print-maker shows off the t-shirt he’s wearing, which is the test print for the new Mozilla shirt he’s driving down to our offices when he gets back to California. We all stand around stunned for a bit. I don’t have the new Mozilla t-shirt, but thanks to this odd meeting we’ve not the copies of the prints above. You can find the prints at the monkeyink website.