Todavía en La Luna

TodavÃ-a en La Luna A Round Table Discussion with DarÃ-o Alvarez Basso, Antonio Bueno, Pierluigi Cattermole Fioravanti, Ignacio MartÃ-nez Lacaci Fortuny, Javier Timmermans de Palma and José Tono MartÃ-nez Some fifteen years have passed since a group of young friends decided to found a magazine to take the pulse of what was happening in Madiid. Theii creation, La Luna de Madrid, published its first issue in November of 1983. For more or less half a decade, La Luna was ar the center of the cultural transformations fashioned in Spain's urban centers in the wake of the political changes which moved Spain from dictatorship to democracy. La Luna was an integral part of a period of cultural effervescence in Madrid summed up by such popular slogans of the era as "De Madrid al Cielo," and "Madrid Me Mata" that adorned everything from napkins to postcards to tee shirts. Perhaps Javier de Juan captured it best in a particularly vivid cover design for the graphic magazine/adult comic book Madriz. He portrays a red bus much like the kind belonging to Madrid's public transportation system, the EMT. Alongside strides a young man moving effortlessly but forcefully in a fashionable suit. He grasps a copy oÃ- Madriz. The slogan complementing this image became Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 1, 1997 154 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies one of the battle cries for young Madrileños: "Vamonos que nos vamos." This slogan captured rhe impatience of a whole youthful generation longing to catch up with the rest of the modern world and leave the past behind. La Luna documented this generation's efforts to transform Spain's cultural landscape in their own image. The magazine quickly transcended the role of scribe and became a promoter and driving force for that cultural shift. It was one of the first publications to promote the work of Almodovar and other young filmmakers. In fact his Borgesian alter ego, Patti Diphusa, had her/his own column in La Luna for over a year. Young musicians, photographers, painters, designers and writers also found a home in the magazine's pages. La Luna was eventually identified with that slippery and poorlyunderstood phenomenon, L· movida. While the magazine had no specific intellectual agenda, it promoted the liberating forces of the postmodern because La Luna's intellectual brain rrusr believed rhat radical posrmodernism provided the best way to challenge the Habermasian vision of modernity championed by the young politicians who swept into power as a result of the PSOE's victories in the municipal elections in 1979 and in the general elections of 1982 generally referred to as the "elecciones del cambio." La Luna at first tentatively collapsed the difference between L· movida and the postmodern but the editors eventually found it in their best interest to disavow this position. This disavowal became necessary when hordes of "hangers on" who wished to become up to date and "in" attached themselves to the surface manifestations of what La Luna espoused without understanding the strongly-held motivations for advocating a wholly different version of what Spain should and could be. The elections held in Spain in the Spring of 1996 ended a decade and a half of Socialist hegemony, installing in their place the more politically conservarive Parrido Popular. This party's polirical agenda is considerablly different from that of the Socialists. For this reason we believe that a retrospective examination on culture in Spain in the 1980s provides an insightful look into the dynamics of cultural change and indicates how Cultural Studies can contribute to this enterprise. Cultural Studies provides a solid vantage point from which to investigate the cultural dynamics to which publications like La Luna responded. It is particularly adept at unraveling the economic, political, and cultural threads of the fabric of a society like that of Spain during the 1980s. In its May, 1986 issue, La Luna featured an important round table discussion about the state of Spanish culture from 1975 onward. It was Round Table Discussion with La Luna 155 significantly titled "Diez, cinco, dos años atrás: ¿qué ha pasado?" A number of young artists (Miguel Angel Arenas...