When some twenty-odd years ago dj’s from Detroit, Europe and Israel met on the beaches of Goa, India, to enjoy the tropical winter and recharge for the upcoming season, out of their exchanges a new musical style was created. As with all influential music movements, it propagated its own drugs, first lsd and when the groove hit popular ground, a neo-hippy light mixture of mdma and speed called xtc.
In the whole set-up of acid house - the drugs, the beats, the re-invention of that hippy thing and the inevitable beautiful people - the beach played an important role. The beach, cradle of human existence according to theories not unfamiliar to the subterranean traveller, is a place where nothing will grow and nothing holds ground, an arid strip of sand between two immensely different bodies of life - the marine world threatened by pollution and over-extended fishing practices and the murderously exploited gaseous world of noise and sunshine. The beach is a no man’s land where nature’s laws do not apply and for that reason it has always been a metaphor for unruly behaviour. And that is what house has wanted to be about, not about fighting the system like hippies and punks pretended to do, but about denying its existence.
I had to think of this when I floated on a quiet sea just fifty metres off the beach of Comaruga on a heat waving August afternoon. Like all tourist hot spots, the beaches of the Costa Dorada have become the operating ground for all kinds of illegal businesses. Unqualified masseurs, unlicensed sunglasses salesmen, unfit movie vendors, they magically appear wherever holiday makers start rubbing their body with sun blocking cream or show other types of touristic behaviour. The police can chase them away as much as they like, they are always coming back, popping up again like mushrooms. There is no stopping the way of the beach on the beach.
In Comaruga business soon spread to the boulevard, the car and care free walkway that for as far as the eye can see stretches alongside the wide white sand strip. The off-the-carpet vendors whom I always thought were called top mantistas but who in this part of the coast (or perhaps this year in our history) are named manteros, suddenly occupied the hot pavement with the well-forged logo typed handbags they specialise in. Their public mostly were sun crazed lower middle class housewives from all over Europe, who found everything they were looking for spread out right in front of them. Look at those bags, it’s a logo and a bargain, it makes one feel they help a poor soul with little options and it is just a safely tiny bit outside the law to buy one. And don’t they want to show how just safely outside the law they can be before returning to their rule obeying and round the clock organised lives! The police chased the vendors away (not the public of course) but they came back and the police chased them away and they came back again. There is no stopping the no man’s anarchy from spilling unto the once fertile lands laid waste by capitalist hyper exploitation, or so it seems.
Early August the mayor of El Vendrell, to which Comaruga belongs, had his reality check. He decided to accept what couldn’t be stopped and allowed the carpet vendors to exercise their trade as they wished. After having been the first council that prohibited the burqa in public spaces, El Vendrell now also became the first to introduce a non-reactive attitude towards top mantismo. The mayor, judging by a televised press conference on his new policy, was rather pleased with himself. Unfortunately, though not unexpectedly, the local community of shopkeepers did not share his feelings. They considered the tax free trade in illegally copied goods unfair competition and demanded a different solution; more in the line of away with the offenders.
After long and hard fought negotiations which were widely covered in the local, regional, national and even Spanish media, a solution was apparently found. We went to see what it was all about. Apart from the cluster of palm trees in which shadow they like to wait out the siesta, the manteros were nowhere to be seen on the beach and its adjourning walk way. We inquired and were shown two blocks from the coast over the main road to a small elevated square with a whitewashed stone railing, the sort of place where an orchestra might play or a dancing contest is held. Whatever else it had been, it was not the best place to sell hot stuff from a blanket.
There was something deeply tragic about the whole scene. Aside from the fact the ultra thin layer of novelty already days after the opening was visibly wearing off and it was all too clear people would soon stop making the effort of walking two blocks to drop by, the cage-like setting was distinctly non beach. Though the vendors’ first priority is making a few euros to survive and perhaps - perhaps - earn enough to send some money home, the utter lack of lawlessness was hurting everybody’s pride. What is the use of selling top manta when there is nobody coming to chase you away?
The well-meant but unfortunately executed solution to the top manta problem was never to last and indeed it wouldn’t. Soon the counsellor of the interior of Catalunya, Iniciativa’s Juan Saura, a man sinking deeper and deeper into melancholic despair from his own policies, ruled the idea against the law. The communities of Comaruga and Calafell and other tourist resorts where the way of the beach has taken over were promised extra police forces to enforce the codes of proper business. The top mantistas are unlawful once again, their business illegal, their futures insecure.
All of this won’t mean the end of top manta. There is a powerful organisation of producers and smugglers behind every fake Gucci bag you buy and it’s unlikely it will accept the verdict of any regional governing body. We are in the final days of the capitalist society and whoever is not taken care of by the system will have to find their own means to survive. In the coming months I hope to serve you with more examples of this crude reality. We are all beach dwellers now.
