There was a distant time, in the last years of Rajoy's legislature, when a few La Sexta programs became the daily refuge from the galloping distortion offered by public (or private) newscasts. Some of us then took up a television habit that we have not lost, despite the fact that nothing is as it was then. The Intermediate continues to spread its dose of progressivism, sometimes of jugs and others more courageous, ready to curb the doses of reactionism that nest in sectors of the left. Wyoming had already been a justified television star years ago, when the Socialists suspended the broadcast of The worst program of the weekfearing that Quim Monzó would repeat on TVE the satire on the monarchy broadcast on TV3. Of its slope of night rocker, highway and van , some of us found out late, for lack of hobby, surely.
His first autobiographical volume, On Your Knees, Monsoon !, bore the traces of a discomplexing that persists in this one, better and more compact, perhaps also more ambitious as an account of the agonies of Francoism and the birth of the Transition. Often it seems to him nothing more than the birth of the mountains before an acceptable democracy, but he has the honesty to show his letters without camouflage. He lived that transition in progress in a chronic balloon of hashish and beer, while chance brought him as a vocalist in a group, Paracelsus, with the Reverend on drums (and later both of them alone). There was, for their expectations, very little transition: just a hoarse rattle loaded with surviving Francoists, at no cost to them or to the powers that had endorsed the regime, and now endorsed democracy.
The best of the book is in the honesty with which it avoids decorating its positions of the time —leftly radical and vocationally extra-parliamentary—
The best of the book is in the honesty with which it avoids decorating its positions of the time - radical left and vocationally extra-parliamentary - and undaunted (that's why it seems to be a black joke that describes the transition as "a Lampedusian change"). The least convincing is the encyclopedic propensity and didactic paternalism ("it hurts me to have to make these clarifications because they make me feel like an old man") to tell the younger ones about what Francoism, misery, censorship, repression or National-Catholicism as a single-color diet. It is as if at times he gives up on the peak of the table in El intermedio , as he does on TV, but with his own script: here those news badges are less funny because immediately the reader longs for the parts in which he tells live his thug experiences.
The memory witness works very well when he travels to London as a jipi and squatter, before leaving his hair up to his ass, when he deplores the proliferation of very clever gurus (there a precious typo sneaks in to talk about the "cooking" of the guru on duty, for "Knowledge"), when he walks through halls and gambling dens on the Rastro de Madrid and also in a different and frustrating Barcelona, when the little less than innocent traffic of hashish from Morocco counts or chance gets him an actor, where he passes almost on tiptoe . But the virtue of the book remains unscathed in its best parts. Against the temptation of the sweetening and corrective Photoshop of who was until his 27 years (including an expendable chapter of the military, already graduated in Medicine), Wyoming is still in his thirteen today. Almost, almost as if forty years of democratic rattling had yielded nothing.
