Some of you may be wondering whether we actually picked up anything for Pulp Intl. during our ballyhooed trip to Lisbon. We did, we just haven’t had to time to sort and scan it yet. But above you see a snapshot of some items we bought at the city’s twice-weekly Feria de Ladra, which apparently has been going on since 1272 (not a typo), and these days takes place at the Campo de Santa Clara, behind the important monastery of São Vicente de Fora.
The market is a marvel. While it isn’t anything close to Le Marché aux Puces de Saint-Ouen in Paris, it remains one of the better troves of vintage matter you’ll find in Europe, and as a bonus is popular with beautiful women and supports a satellite industry of interesting bars and eateries. Among the items we found were old issues of the pop culture magazine Plateia, crime comics such as Secreto Agente Z33, and a copy of the movie mag Colecção Cinema. We’ll be scanning and uploading those throughout the year, and they’ll be nice reminders of a good trip. Well, mostly good.
When the Pulp Intl. girlfriends left, things went a bit haywire. We’ll share only one episode: the panic inducing disappearance of one of our group, who had been done in by Lisbon’s numerous hills as we searched for a music bar one night, and had headed home to rest with his left arm tingling (which he attributed to a pulled shoulder muscle he’d suffered after taking a spill on what we nicknamed the “heroin stairs”). We stayed at the bar and when we returned hours later he was nowhere to be seen. Frantic calls to his phone produced nothing. Calls to the hospitals ditto. Uh oh.
We organized ourselves for a 4 a.m. search of the deserted barrio where the bar was. Our working theory: coronary, collapsed, rolled into a ditch, died. That hadn’t happened. What had happened was he walked down the hills as planned, was near the apartment we’d rented, but got tractor beamed into a strip club where he spent 1,300 euros on lap dances. Under the circumstances, he’d heard none of our calls. Said he: “I felt better by the time I was passing the club.” Funny episode, but we think he’s due for a medical check-up. The week that was, Pulp Intl. style.
