My Own Private Venice

Forwarding address

2010-08-02T10:59:00.000-07:00

Just as I moved from Venice, I have moved blogs.

My new blog is called "Another part of the island."

You can find it here...

Another part of the island.

Hope you come along for the ride!!

Ciao, Venezia

2010-03-25T03:30:00.001-07:00

1,583 yesterdays
have gone
since first I came,
a late arrival.
The best of the party
was over, the glory
long ago turned
to dust; but your
peerless beauty
still pierces my heart
with an exquisite pain.

Now
I must go.
Love and duty call,
and the greatest work of my life
yet to be done
on other shores
far from your vanishing
splendor.

But you have filled my soul,
transformed me,
and a part of you remains,
here,
in my foolish, vagrant heart,
a tune that lingers
on my lips, ever waiting
to be sung.

O, my Venezia,
queen of the seas,
wreathed with seaweed
trimmed with pearls,
I will love you from afar
as I have loved you near.

Larry Mellman
25.III.2009
Venezia

Paradise Regained

2010-03-20T13:53:00.001-07:00

Giotto, The Kiss of Judas, Scrovegni Chapel, Padova

PARADISE REGAINED
Three hours in the Scrovegni Chapel

On March 18, at 9-30 AM, in Padova, Italy, I stepped into the Scrovegni Chapel for what would be a three hour visit.

This visit was a most brilliant gift. You must understand, first of all, as anyone who has ever been there well knows, that you are only allowed fifteen minutes in the chapel, and those fifteen minutes cost 12 euros. It is possible to book a double turn on summer evenings; but even half an hour is scarcely enough time to see each of the 40 frescoes and the wall decorations which are an integral part of the design. This is an endless source of frustration to those of us who love the frescoes painted here by Giotto around 1305. Even the casual visitor, merely ticking off items on a checklist of things to be done, or the garrulous school children with cellphones in hand, are instantly overwhelmed. There is simply too much information to process in 15 or 30 minute increments.

A couple weeks ago I was opining to my friends Amy and Tom over lunch just how frustrating that was. Amy simply said, "you don't have my friends." She said she would see what she could do and get back to me. The result was an "unlimited" visit.

My first visit to the Scrovegni Chapel was in the winter of 2006. At that time I wrote of the visit, "There are certain things for which nothing prepares you." Scrovegni was a total revelation. (If you manage to read this through, then you might be interested in that first impression.)

I made subsequent visits, but on each occasion I was so disoriented by the overall splendor of the place that it was difficult to focus. Sometimes the angle of the sun and the light were against me. I decided only to look at one or two of the frescoes, and, adhered to the mantra I had developed in Assisi, "follow the light". Returning became expensive.

My introduction to the Scrovegni chapel coincided with my discovery of the Gothic, led by my teacher, the inestimable John Ruskin. The high renaissance lost its allure, compared to the art that gave birth to it, the frescoes of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. As my love of the Gothic grew, I was drawn to Assisi, to see Giotto's frescoes in the Basilica di San Francesco. Those five days, burned indelibly in my memory, were an artistic and spiritual epiphany (as recounted here, here, here, and here). Assisi is a very special place; it was here that St. Francis was born and morphed into the radiant creature who became both a saint and the spiritual founder of the Franciscan order. These vibrations rise from deep in the Umbrian hills, like the olive trees, providing shade and sustenance.

The experience at Assisi cannot be more different from Scrovegni. The Basilica di San Francesco is free, the doors open to the air. I could sit and ponder the miraculous images at will. I spent three or four hours a day there, until sponge-like I was saturated. The guards got to know me. I spent the rest of my time exploring the medieval town and the other landmarks of St. Francis's story, feeling deeply moved by the rich young man who gave up everything to follow a calling so humble and incomprehensible that miracles accrued around him the way families accrue around others, manifestations of an unlimited and unconditional love of all creation. This was the man who preached to the birds.

The panel in the Basilica di San Francesco entitled Predica agli Uccelli (Sermon to the Birds) is inexpressibly touching in its simplicity and in its humility. At liberty to linger over these images, I began to decipher their meaning and to parse the visual language which Giotto employs to tell his story, to understand how these paintings work as narrative, a movie spread across the walls, each leading to the next, plot point to plot point. I began to grasp the techniques used to guide our eyes and our hearts through the unfolding of the tale.

I left Assisi a changed person, different from how I came, both in my understanding and appreciation of this art, and in the profound impact of the story of Saint Francis; not the later versions in which he was twisted by the Church into a militant crusader, but the essential story of a man filled with endless and unconditional love for all creation.

In the past five years I have contemplated an extraordinary amount of great art, from the ancient Greeks and Assyrians and Sumerians to the art of now. Last winter when I was in Munich, I chanced through the Glyptotek. I was stunned by the Greek statues there, or the good Roman copies of them. What is most striking is their lifelike quality. One would not be surprised to see them move. I saw clearly on that cold winter day that all western art has always aspired to the Greek, that -- for whatever reason -- the Greek stonework represents a flood tide of human creativity, unsurpassed by anyone at any time. This was the ideal toward which the renaissance, and the Romans who inspired it, strove.

That was when I decided I needed to go to London to see the Parthenon ("Elgin") marbles. In their presence I thoroughly understood why all western art aspired to them. Though they are mostly broken and fragmentary, what remains of them is of such ravishing beauty that how they might have been when new and freshly painted boggles the mind. Every piece is filled with action; though they may be carved in stone, they are alive with movement. They are, and this is essential, narrative-driven. They tell stories. They unfold in time, the time it takes for us to follow the story and the time it takes for the story to happen. All the greatest art tells stories, and in most cases the greatest is the greatest because the artists invented ever new and more compelling ways to tell their stories.

I visited the Scrovegni Chapel fresh from my trip to London with those thoughts on my mind.

The Scrovegni Chapel is also known as the Arena Chapel because it was added to the Scrovegni palace which was built at the end of the thirteenth century on the site of a Roman arena. Scarcely half a block away is the Chiesa degli Eremitani, a much larger gothic church that was almost totally destroyed by bombs during World War II, shattering forever the Mantegna frescoes on the walls of the Ovetari Chapel. What remains is beautiful indeed; but very little little remains.

It is important to bear this in mind when entering the Scrovegni Chapel, which is small, compact, and could easily have been entirely reduced to rubble by one errant bomb. That it survives at all, that the frescoes remain nearly intact, seven hundred years after they were painted, is nothing short of miraculous.

The building itself is an uprepossessing Gothic brick structure of no particular distinction other than the miracle of its survival. The palace it abutted is gone; the Roman arena is a crumbling mass of skeletal remains. In the "Last Judgement" covering the west wall of the interior of the chapel, Enrico Scrovegni kneels, presenting a model of the chapel -- its pink stucco exterior still fresh, edged with white marble work -- to the Virgin.

Scrovegni was an unconscionably rich usurer with a very bad reputation. It was said that he built the chapel to secure his place in heaven. Given how it turned out, I would be willing to cut him some slack. He built the building and hired Giotto to paint the interior because Giotto was the most celebrated artist of his time.

More is known about Giotto than many of the early artists, but the facts, derived from contracts, letters, legal documents, provide only a skeleton, and as for the character of the man, we must rely on notoriously subjective history, such as Vasari's account in his Lives. In a certain sense, the life of Giotto can be viewed as a myth, much like the myth of St. Francis he illustrated in churches.

He was, the story goes, a particularly clever and happy lad of ten, tending sheep, when the great artist Cimabue chanced upon him and saw that he was drawing incredibly lifelike sheep on flat rocks with a sharp stone. (This would be panel one in the fresco cycle of the Life of Giotto.)

Cimabue himself is another legendary artist of the earliest dawn of the Renaissance. According to Vasari, Cimabue surpassed his teachers because they, Greek (read Byzantine) masters, "never caring to advance their art, did everything not in the good manner of ancient Greece, but after the rude manner of those times." The stranglehold of hieratic Byzantine iconography was being undermined by artists like Cimabue, and later Giotto, who "[drew] accurately from life which had been neglected for more than two hundred years."

First Cimabue, and later Giotto, were invited to decorate the interior of the newly constructed Basilica di San Francesco in Assisi (ca. 1296). The flowering of the order of Franciscans was certainly a boon to Giotto. His talents were clearly superior and soon he was in great demand throughout Italy, in Assisi, in Padova, in Florence, in Naples, in Milan, in Rome, painting not only the story of St. Francis but the central stories of Christianity.

What he painted was, then, and remains, unique in the breadth of its humanity. He did not paint the perfect musculature of the Greeks and Romans, the classic ideals of form and feature that were taken up again by the renaissance. He painted, instead, real people, in real situations, expressing real emotions appropriate to the scene. In doing so, he animated them in a way not seen since the Parthenon friezes and pediments danced in technicolor. Giotto infused his figures with life.

What is a "fresco"? At the risk of being pedantic, I think it is necessary to address certain features of this particular medium, to put the achievement into perspective.

Medieval buildings were constructed of wood (all those long vanished) or brick and stone, as had been the Roman buildings before them. In many cases, the older Roman structures were used as quarries for the building materials needed for new construction. Certainly brick and stone from the old Roman arena were used to build the Scrovegni palace, now itself vanished more completely than the arena it was built from.

The brick walls, inside and out, might then be covered with plaster, which provided a smooth surface to decorate. After mosaics and marble cladding, the most expensive interior wall coverings were tapestries, which provided insulation and warmth as well as decorative beauty and could even be hung over bare bricks. The more money you had to spend, the more splendid the tapestries you commissioned, heavy with gold and silver thread which had the added advantage of amplifying light. Pope Leo X, when he commissioned drawings from Rafaello for a set of tapestries for the Sistine Chapel, specifically requested that large quantities of gold and silver thread be employed in the weaving to make the tapestries as luxurious as possible.

The idea of painting walls was a no-brainer, but pigments applied to dry plaster did not adhere well; they cracked and flaked. However, if certain pigments were applied while the plaster was still wet, they fused with the wet plaster, they bonded; when they dried the colors retained both their brightness and their finish. This technique, called "buon fresco," -- good fresco -- was the most complex and painstakingly laborious, but provided images that have lasted for almost a millenium. And they were cheaper, even throwing in the artists' fees, than weaving fine tapestries. The pigments were not as expensive, the gold Byzantine backgrounds were replaced with naturalistic skies and landscapes; the plaster was cheap enough; and the artists were paid for their practical skills, not in proportion to their genius. Not everyone had pockets as deep as the Pope, and to a man like Scrovegni a painted interior by Master Giotto was made even more appealing by its relatively modest price tag.

There were tremendous technical difficulties to creating a frescoed wall. First of all there was its size. Obviously an entire wall could not be painted before the plaster dried. A first coating of plaster was applied, and then smaller sections were re-plastered and painted upon while still wet. The daily quotient was called a "giornata," a day, and depended upon what the artist had in mind.

Secondly, in order to cover an entire wall with a coherent narrative, the artists couldn't simply jump in and draw or paint freehand. Nor could it be painted, piece by piece, day by day, spontaneously. As with tapestries, drawings had to made first. These drawings were called cartoons. They were rougly sketched in charcoal and then drawn even more finely with a reddish chalk on paper or cloth. The cartoon was placed against the wall. The outlines of the design were pricked and often rubbed with bags of charcoal dust which penetrated the pricked holes and left an outline on the plaster. Only then, day by day, section by section, the colors were applied to the final image.

Thirdly, Giotto painted over forty fresco panels in the Scrovegni chapel. They run along the walls, in three tiers, to be read in sequence, from left to right, like a picture book. Not only did each panel have to be painted, but the entire sequence of panels had to be determined. They not only read sequentially, but they can be read vertically as well. Laterally they tell the story; vertically they are linked symbolically. In addition to the lateral and vertical thrusts, the walls face each other and there is also a mystical/symbolic correspondence between images facing each other across the chapel. It is a veritable cat's-cradle of narrative thrust and symbolic correspondences, intricately planned and drawn before any pigment ever touched wet plaster. It had to be. The way it all fits together is too deliberate. Part of Giotto's genius is precisely the way in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts even though no part is less than perfect.

Walking into the Scrovegni Chapel is in fact like walking into storybook unfolding in every direction. But there is also something in the aggregate, in the overall impact of the space separate from the beauty of its component parts. It was something I first noticed at the Basilica di San Francesco in Assisi, and which is equally evident in the Scrovegni chapel.

This overall impact can only be called festive. There is something positively joyous in the decoration of these basilicas; as if they had been created for a cosmic birthday party. Every surface is decorated, some painted like marble, others like gift and candy wrappers, colorful geometic patterns and sumptuous floral designs that fill the spaces around and between the fresco panels themselves. They are filled with trompe l'oeil architectural illusions and textured surfaces that don't exist. In Assisi the pilasters and vaults are tattooed with festive patterns, with swirls and stripes in pastels and blazing jewel tones. Here religion presented itself as a gala experience, with joy exuberantly wrapping the deeper mysteries explored in the painted panels telling the stories.

The practical perspective (in a time whose "perspective" was considered primitive compared to the fetishized perspective of the high renaissance), evidenced in the trompe l'oeil architectural details, is painted flawlessly, so flawlessly that you are easily taken in, your eye is completely deceived. You believe they are real. Twice, in Assisi, I was fooled by the dentils, toothlike notches that decorate the cornices under the frescoes. On Tuesday, standing in the central aisle, I was totally convinced the cornices and dentils were real, walked over, touched them. They were flat, two-dimensional, illusory. But again on Thursday they fooled me. "I touched them," I thought. Or did I? They looked so real I doubted myself. I had to touch them again, so complete was the illusion.

Scrovegni is filled with such detail. There is a sly and joyous virtuosity at work framing the main feature: the narrative itself.

It was a pleasure to visit the Scrovegni Chapel with Tom. He is a professor of art history, a specialist in the Italian renaissance, and didn't mind the questions with which I peppered him. Additionally, his eye, drawn to different details, helped me to see things I might otherwise have missed. Below the bottom tier of frescos are the famous Virtues and Vices panels painted in an ancient Roman technique to look as though they were carved in marble. But there are also smaller plaques painted between these panels, architectural details. Tom pointed to one in particular, its corner chipped off, as if it were part of an ancient wall.

"I never quite appreciated before," he said to me, pointing this out, "how masterful they were, in their presentation of space and time." Not only in the narrative sense, he stressed; the stories unfold in time and space. But in details like that, which are illusions occupying space and alluding to the passage of time, reminding us of our mortality.

There is a small decorative plaque between panels 24 ( The Miracle at Cana ) and 25 (The Raising of Lazarus) on the north wall which shows Jonah's legs sticking out of the mouth of the whale into which he is disappearing. It is a miniature; there are several between the major panels on this wall. I mentioned it to Tom, a perfect little masterpiece where the part (we neither see all or Jonah nor all of the whale) stands for the whole.

"Those are Old Testament images which prefigure the events in the subsequent panels," Tom replied. Old Testament Jonah in the belly of the whale prefigures Christ's death. The whale can also be seen as swallowing him, or regurgitating him, which prefigures the resurrection. I needed Tom's binoculars to see the lovely panel of the lioness with three cubs. "The newborn cubs were dead for three days and then the mother breathed life into them." Tom said. "Christ lay entombed for three days."

Enjoying the luxury of time, I started with the first panel, The Rejection of Joachim's Sacrifice, and carefully followed the entire sequence of the narrative, through events from the life of Joachim, Mary's father, occupying the top tier of the south wall. Facing this sequence, on the top tier of the north wall, the Scenes from the Life of the Virgin begin. These run to the arch in front of the chancel on the east wall and culminate in the annunciation -- God sending the angel to Mary, above, and the angel making the announcement to Mary below. This carries the eye to the Scenes from the Life of Christ running around the south wall and up the north wall.

I spent an hour following the line of the narrative, which culminates, on the west wall with the Last Judgment. It is a triumphantly medieval conception, Dantesque in its layered storytelling, for here everything happens at once and wherever your eye goes, it is drawn around and through all the aspects of the climactic moment.

Having read through the story, I luxuriated in the individual images. At one point both Tom and I were both looking at The Flight into Egypt. He asked me what I made of the gesture the green-robed figure on the left was making with his right hand. I said that it looked to me as though it were designed to continue the diagonal thrust along the line of the strap across the donkeys rear haunches and up through the upper right quadrant, where an angel hovers above Joseph and a steep mountain road cascades through the center of the image, both outlining Mary and leading into the distance.

"The gestures are all symbolic," Tom said. "It means something. Even if its reference is obscure to us, Giotto was making a statement with it."

I mentioned that I thought the narrative techniques here were quite different from those of the Basilica di San Francesco where the eye is drawn directly from panel to panel more vigorously. These seemed more self-contained to me.

"I was noticing how they are arranged to lead the eye from the foreground into the background," Tom said. His point was that Giotto had reached a very high level of spatial awareness, and that the narrative occupied an interior space as well as the exterior, temporal, thrust leading to the next image.

The more I looked, the more I was struck not by the painterly techniques, but by the essence of the story itself.

For most of my life I viewed paintings such as these as works of art, detached from their religious significance. It was easy enough. I was raised as a non-practicing Jew; Christianity was at best alien, at worst hostile. When I was seven a Catholic family lived in the apartment below us, and they had several children, two my age. We often played elaborate psychodramas of their devising, in which I was invariably cast into a pit of snakes or otherwise humiliated for being a Christ-killer, which I wasn't because I had no idea who Christ was. But they knew, and they knew I was, and the dramas they acted out with me were liturgical in essence and childhood-fantasy in their dramaturgy. They usually ended with the girl closest to my age, Maureen, stealing impassioned kisses at game's end while admonishing me, "Don't tell my brother! He'll beat you up!"

I easily separated the artistry from the religious content, in music as well as in visual art. Everything changed for me in Assisi, when I stepped into the narrative of Saint Frances. Experiencing the content made the images more vivid and meaningful, so that the story of the gentle saint filled me with wonder. I opened myself to experiencing it as in insider; certainly not an orthodox insider, but an insider nonetheless. This was easy with the story of Saint Francis. The Scrovegni frescoes, however, are the distillation of the entire Christian mythos and I could hardly divorce subject matter from its representation. This greatest of all art compelled me to consider its meaning, and tendered the central concepts of sin and redemption for my contemplation. I am gay, I am Jewish, I was a communist, I am an agnostic. My sins are legion, nor are they things I could or would change. I know there is mystery and magic at the center of the universe but I prefer not to translate it into anthropomorphic terms, nor subscribe to any dogma. I feel the Unnamed in my own moments of spiritual exaltation; I am filled with gratitude and compassion in my own way, not only at certain times but at any time. I felt deeply that religion, in my humble opinion, should begin with joy and gratitude and end in forgiveness. These are interior acts. They live deep within and need not be worn on one's sleeve.

Jesus was, after all, an outsider; he infuriated the religious and political establishment with his radical departure from the prevailing orthodoxy and his contempt for worldly possessions. "It is easier," he said, "for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven." He threw the money changers from the temple. How can this square with today's neo-Calvinist billionaires? How has this ever squared with the splendor and luxury of the Catholic church? What sense can be made of Lloyd Blankfein's claim that, as Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs he has "been doing God's work"? Logic and faith must be twisted like a pretzel for such accommodations. As with the story of Saint Francis, one must penetrate the accretions of centuries of dogma and self-serving doctrinal debate to get in touch with the real impulses and the real message.

Artists like Giotto facilitate this, and that is what makes their art so brilliant. The Scrovegni frescoes, though orthodox enough, are filled with real people to whom extraordinary things are happening. Calaphas is so angry at Jesus he tears open his shirt (the same gesture seen in the "Ira" (anger) panel of the Seven Vices). The ass upon which Jesus rides into Jerusalem is docile, humble, his eyes sweet, serene, resigned. The mothers weep real tears as their children are brutally hacked up in the Slaughter of the Innocents. The religious subtext is subsumed in the human drama and made comprehensible by the simple reality of recognizable people. As the story unfolds the characters' faces become familiar, they wear the same clothes so that we know who they are even when their backs are toward us. Everything conspires to fill us with understanding.

As architecture meets (and often exceeds) our need for shelter, art meets our need for beauty, for transcendence. Through art we can transcend our place and time. We can read the Parthenon marbles, we can experience the Passion through Giotto's pictures. We encounter the eternal.

When I think about these things, my mind goes back to something I read about Schopenhauer. I am no philosopher, and have never read Schopenhauer, but I read about Schopenhauer's influence on Wagner in Bruce Magee's fascinating book "The Tristan Chord." He distills the essence of Schopenhauer as follows. There is what we can know, and what we cannot know because we cannot apprehend it directly. That which lies beyond our comprehension is the "thing in itself." We lack the senses, the means, the capability to experience or comprehend the thing-in-itself, which can be looked at as the direct experience of the transcendent, the majesty and terror at the heart of creation, the subject of Greek tragedy, the essence of the universe, otherwise dressed as a god in the center of a religious cosmology. It's there but we cannot know it directly, just as we would go blind if we stared into the sun.

But there are clues, approximations, intimations, from nature and from its representation in art. For Schopenhauer two particularly human phenomena most closely approximate the experience of the thing-in-itself: sexual orgasm and opera. (Now here, I thought, is a man after my own heart!)

Little need be said here about orgasm; we can at least all agree that we know what it is, both in its electrifying presence and its sweet and peaceful aftermath. But you have to love opera as I do, or as Schopenhauer must have, to understand that part of the proposition. I can only say that opera provides a unique opportunity; what Wagner called the gesamtkunstwerk, the fusion of all the arts into a unified, universal whole. In opera not only is our ear engaged, but also our eyes; music and visual and dramatic spectacle fuse into a triple-whammy. The whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Although the perfect 10 -- when it all comes together -- is elusive, its pursuit is rewarded with lots of 7s, 8s, and even 9s, enough to keep you going, to know that every now and then there will be more, the full Monty, the unmitigated brush with glory.

But I must add to those experiences, for me, certain works of art, certainly the Parthenon Marbles and the frescoes of the Scrovegni chapel. They have the power to shift the tectonic plates of everday life, burst the sky and shower radiance. In my own personal pursuit of the revelations that art provides, I have found that the great churches of the world, filled with silence, are spiritual places where we are invited to contemplate the eternal; but when they are filled with music, we hear it as well as see it. We feel it. For an instant or an hour, we become sublime.

There is nothing in this world, no surface existing, that douldn't be improved by a Giotto fresco, preferably a Saint Francis cycle. (The saint preaching to the birds or stripping off his clothing to return to his father as he rejects worldly weath, might well be placed beside the banks and bourses of the world as a reminder of true worth.) These works certainly take me into the presence of whatever you wish to call it: god, nirvana, bliss, the thing-in-itself, the sublime. That's where I make my peace with existence in all its wrinkles and permutations of sorrow and joy, grief and ecstasy; where I experience my transcendence and offer my gratitude. My avatar, my Virgil in the dark forest of human folly, is art, which invariably inspires me to praise, joy, and forgiveness.

The Scrovegni Chapel is the crystallization of the love at the heart of the story. It is a gift to us all, to remind us of the heights of which we are capable and the depths to which we sink. Whether by virtue of, or in spite of, its religious language, it allows us to experience our own transcendence of suffering and ascent to paradise.

The west wall is a single picture: The Last Judgement. It's all there, unfolding in complex narrative waves and swirls, the ecstatic peace of heaven, the torments of hell, the peculiar existential crossroads of purgatory, culminating with the compassionate Jesus at its center. Everything is interconnected. At the foot of the painting Enrico Scrovegni offers his lovely pink chapel to the Virgin, hoping to secure his place in heaven. It is peculiarly ironic. His father Roderigo was carefully placed by Dante in the inner ring of the seventh circle of hell, where the usurers along with the sodomites suffer in a burning desert swept by a rain of fire. Hoping to avoid such a fate, Enrico Scrovegni offers up the lovely chapel, decorated by Giotto. I think it fitting that Giotto's work is offered up to the Virgin, who was as sure to be pleased by its felicitous beauties as we are.

That, in the end, is the essence of art. It is a point of tangency with the sublime and renders it comprehensible. In the world of the painted image, nothing compares to the emotional, visceral, spiritual impact of Giotto. In the Scrovegni Chapel he provides us a direct connection to the love that animates the universe.

Larry Mellman
20.III.2010
Venezia

TORINO | PETER GRIMES | MOVIE MUSEUM

2010-03-02T04:49:00.000-08:00

I went to Torino to see Peter Grimes at the Teatro Regio with Mark as Captain Balstrode. I didn't have a lot of time, and couldn't really do the city justice, but I did what I could and saw enough to know that I would go back in a heartbeat to see the rest!

The city is beautiful, the buildings are beautiful, the piazzas
are beautiful, the Palazzo Madama Museum
is brilliant, as are, I'm sure, the Modern Art Museum and the Egyptian Museum which I didn't see.

But Peter Grimes alone was worth the trip.

Mark S. Doss, Nancy Gustafson, Yutaka Sado, Neil Shicoff

This production is a veteran, seen in other houses including the Royal Opera House. It is also several years old, which means that much of the original Willy Decker stage direction has been lost in the shuffle. There are some inexplicable choices, but no deal-breakers. The production is generally simple, clean, and handsome.

Neil Shicoff was a brutish and tormented Grimes; whatever he lacked in stature and voice he made up for in artistry. His highlying voice was clarion, the lower register difficult; but he brought intensity, focus and musicality and his peak moments were memorable.

Nancy Gustafson was a perfect Ellen Orford; she has internalized the role, and the presence she conjures, as well as her voice, are pitch perfect for the character and the music.

This was Mark's first Balstrode. He moved quickly from being tentative to being a commanding presence, and sang Britten's music beautifully. Balstrode and Ned (George von Bergen) worked beautifully together, physically and vocally, as they helped haul in Grimes' boat. The Grimes/Balstrode duet was tense and anguished. Scene 2, in the tavern, built inexorably and here as everywhere the chorus was powerful.

The conductor, Yutaka Sado, was insightful, inspired I thought, and the orchestra played brilliantly. Kudos to the brass section, who handled not only the explosive climaxes, but the delicate part writing for soft brass, without ever bobbling a note.

The Grimes/Ellen Orford duet in Act II, after Ellen sees the bruise on the apprentice and realizes the train is going off the tracks, saw temperaments, voices, characters equally matched and pushed to their psychological limits. It was devastating; the doom was palpable. The end is not pretty, but the aggregate effect -- music, voices, drama -- was transcendent.

"Peter Grimes" is not an easy opera, not as hummable as La Traviata or as ingratiating as The Marriage of Figaro. It is about existential loneliness and profound personal anguish, about being an outcast in a world of hypocritical pieties and militant moralism. The music is orchestrally brilliant, but Britten's idiosyncratic vocal writing here requires an attentive ear; it's not hum-along stuff. The principals, the orchestra, the chorus, were firing on all cylinders the night I heard them. It was an evening of gut-wrenching drama and superior music-making, a great night at the opera.

The big surprise for me was the Museo Nazionale del Cinema. I didn't know it was there and didn't know what to expect. The building itself is especially peculiar. Built originally as a synagogue it resembles the top of a skyscraper without the skyscraper, a dome and spire planted firmly on the ground.

The exhibits examine the origins of film from their primitive beginnings in projected shadows and shadow puppets, and then examine the effect of introducing lenses between the light source and the image, making things bigger or smaller, focusing on details or casting spectra of color with prisms. It moves through stereoptical 3-D images or scenes in which manipulating the light source changes the image from day to night, magic lanterns enabling people to see things they wouldn't ordinarily see, satisfying their curiority and taking them on trips. Other devices make the images move by spinning them, an Infernal Concert of dancing skeletons, people getting on streets cars, bringing the miracle of moving images. There is an amazing variety of devices which produce moving images in ingenious ways.

George Demeny took great delight in recording simple moments: his lips saying "je vous aime," or his girlfriend playing with a fan. There is a looped sequence of his early attempts that are infectious with their sheer joy in movement: in one bit, a horse and carriage pass a long wall in one direction while a guy crosses from the other. In another, he leaps widly about; it is exuberant, the sheer joy of motion. It is Andy Warhol, only better; it is mercifully brief, sly and joyous, and created a century earlier.

There are also rooms of memorabilia exhibits: Fellini's hat and scarf, production drawings, important scripts such as the third revised final typescript of Citizen Kane with pencilled notes by Orson Welles and his secretary.

Meanwhile, the interior of the dome is a massive light show. Shutters shut out or let in natural light while projections dance on the interior surface to Phillip Glass and similar spacey music. The effect is magical, and drama is added by the elevator rising slowly and disappearing into the hole at the top of the dome just large enough to accomodate it. The counterweight that descends as the elevator rises is a flat rectangular pendulum of polished chrome. The vast room beneath is filled with recliners with headphones in the headrests where you can lay back and either look up, or at a movie screen showing clips of some of the greatest scenes in film.

Arranged around this area is a labyrinth of rooms, each creating a unique viewing environment for a looped sequence of thematically related scenes. One of the rooms is a lurid red, the round bed in the center is covered in red velvet with matching pillows inviting you to lay down. The screen is in the ceiling above the bed. I watched Marlon Brando fucking Maria Schneider in "Last Tango in Paris." It was the love scene room.

In another room the theme was explosions and included the opening tracking shot of "Touch of Evil," up to and including the car exploding; a head exploding in David Cronenberg's "Scanners," and Belmondo, face painted blue, wrapping his head with dynamite and, well, exploding...

And then there was Joan Allen's orgasmic bath when the walls begin turning colors in "Pleasantville" as her ecstasy builds until the black-and-white house explodes in colorful flames. I had forgotten what a great moment that was!

Torino is beautiful, the snow covered Alps are beautiful, the Palazzo Madama and Palazzo Reale are beautiful, the squares and the buildings are beautiful, the opera is beautiful, but, if you love movies, the real reason to go to Torino is the Museo Nazionale del Cinema. It was built by people who love movies for people who love movies and they have succeeded in giving a layered experience of the phenomenon of film and its culture with a lot of substance and a lot of razzle-dazzle.

Munich Rocks!

2010-02-16T03:20:00.000-08:00

Nothing is ever quite what you expect.

I went to Munich to go to the opera to hear my friend Erika's Salome at the Bavarian State Opera. I did a bit of research so I would know what to see. Everything was a great surprise.

First off, the Munich Salome. It was originally conceived and directed by William Friedkin (director of The Exorcist, The French Connection, The Boys in the the Band, etc.) The production is handsome indeed, always visually interesting, and the concept of Salome different from Bologna (which I caught twice two weeks ago). In Bologna Erika channeled an obsessed twelve-year old; Salome as Lolita. In Munich Salome was more womanly, Salome as Marilyn, and Erika's performance was intense, passionate, and gorgeously sung.

Munich is a beautiful city, the capital of kingdom ruled by the same family for a millenium (1180-1918). After World War I it was briefly governed by the Communists and they were in turn driven out the the Nazis. Munich was Hitler's home base. The first concentration camp, Dachau, is a suburb. Munich was reduced to rubble at the end of World War 2, and they had to choose between bull-dozing and starting from scratch, or resurrecting the old city (as much as could be resurrected). They chose the latter.

This makes Munich a city of contrasts. Old buildings that survived and older buildings that were rebuilt in a modernized period style, stand side-by-side with modern buildings, from mid-century modern to post-modern. This cocktail works. What characterizes the look of the city over all is the palette of pastel colors and the elaborate stucco work. Munich is heavily rococo, inside and out; much of it is frosted with intricate stucco work, like the work of dizzy bees, dense and opulent.

It is deeply traditional, and even the modern here is Bavarian and has a tailored look, tailored both in itself and in relation to city. It was cold and snowy when I was there, so I could not enjoy the vast parks and riverbanks and cafes on the squares. I spent a lot of time inside the churches and palaces and museums.

Natives refer proudly to the Italianate tastes of the Wittelsbachs, from the late Renaissance forward. The Theatine Church was built in the late 17th C. by an Italian architect who based its design of the Church of San Andrea del Valle in Rome. It was completed sixty years later by Francois de Cuvilles, who iced the interior with a dense white frosting of rococo stucco-work. The yellow exterior is characteristic, and is echoed throughout the city. It is an imperial pastel, also seen at Schonbrunn and throughout Vienna. The Bavarian yellow is a marriage of Italian sensibility and Hapsburg imperial style.

There is little medieval work left; this is Rococo heaven. Most of the business streets in the center have a pleasantly 19th century feel, with touches of Belle Epoque and art deco. The pastels and the stucco curlicues (usually in a complementary pastel) are ubiquitous.

Four art museuems covering the renaissance to the present day are clustered together. The Alte Pinakothek covers the renaissance, baroque and classical, with an impressive selections of Rubens. I was particularly blown away by an Andrea del Sarto, which, although hanging in a room with masterpieces by Lippi, Ghirlandaio, Rafaello, Leonardo and Perugino, was a standout! These paintings are in luminous condition.

It was interesting to see a Rafaello and a Leondardo hanging side by side. The Leonard is small, intricate, architectural. Leonardo's monumental intellect is too great for painting. The Rafaello, in contrast, is open and simple, fresh, straightforwardly appealing to our emotions through our senses. A wonderful Lippi annunciation rises in verticals linked by background arches. The thrust is upward; at the center a stalk of lilies like a shepherd's staff meets the dove that ties it all together like the bow on a gift package.

The Botticelli is daring because the body of the dead Christ is that of an Adonis (not unlike the "Barberini" Faun at the Glyptothek). The scene is a pieta and he lies across Mary's lap. There is no blood to be seen outside the thin surgical incisions in his feet and side. It is the perfect body of a muscular young athlete in his prime.

The Van Goghs at the Neue Pinakotek were an especial treat. One forgets how moving Van Gogh's work is. They have nowhere near the sheer volume of Van Gogh's as Amsterdam, but of the three they have I had never seen two before (everyone has seen the sunflowers!). They are not so much painted as sculpted in paint, their impact is immediate and visceral. Viewed to the accompanying babble of school children sprawled on the floor with drawing pads and colors, I was moved to tears.

I lunched twice at the cafe at the Brandhorst Museum. It was inviting, cleanly modern, with fresh flowers on the tables and a short but intriguing menu. Specifically, I saw that they were featuring a cheeseburger. A good cheeseburger is impossible to find in Italy; so I thought I would give it a try. Good choice! It was delicious, and the "country potatoes" were a dream, crisp and seasoned outside, steamy soft inside. I told the waitress that the hamburger was sensational and she said their Chef was originally from Mexico (that explained the omelet with chorizo I had the next day) via Paris; he ground the meat himself. The omelet was thin and delicate, a sour cream type cheese, carmelized onions and bits of chorizo inside, drizzled with a balsamic vinegar reduction.

The Brandhorst is the Munich equivalent of the Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana in Venice: up to the minute art. The Pinakothek der Modern had some beautiful Dan Flavin rooms, and I was fascinated by the Joseph Beuys collection; it was the first time I really got him. The pieces were beautifully, thoughtfully, understandingly displayed, releasing the particular Beuys magic. It was also a pleasure to see a lot of Max Beckmann. He recorded his life and his dreams; the paintings are simultaneously mundane and fantastic.

The Brandhorst, previously a private collection, is centered on a large room with twelve canvases entitled "Lepanto" painted by Cy Twombly for the 2001 Biennale in Venice. The canvases depict the Battle of Lepanto, an important short term victory for the Venetian Republic that did not stem the tide of history which was running against her. The paintings are vivid and read like a movie, the cannon explosions bursting like fireworks and the boats surging across the sea. I understood Twombly's brilliance for the first time; until Lepanto I had viewed him as a one-trick pony with a little bit of Emperor's New Clothes thrown in. I joyfully admitted I was wrong. All the Twomblys in the collection are brilliant.

Hell, Munich is brilliant.

[ MUNICH GALLERY]

Caravaggio. Lotto. Ribera

2010-01-12T09:09:00.000-08:00

Caravaggio. Lotto. Ribera.
(Musei Civici dei Eremitani, Padova)

Those were the top-billed names on the dramatic posters around town featuring Caravaggio's Boy Bitten by Lizard (Ragazzo morso dal ramarro). In fact, that was the only Caravaggio, with three Lottos and Riberas. The show was the personal collection of Roberto Longhi, the pre-eminent Italian art critic of the 20th Century. Longhi was responsible for the revival of interest in Renaissance master Piero della Francesca, and his works on Piero and on Caravaggio set the bar for decades.

Longhi had what all great art critics need, an unfailing eye, and the collection is remarkable in many, many ways beyond Caravaggio, Lotto and Ribera. Although the headliners' works are brilliant masterpieces, so are many other pieces in the show, the difference being that they are less well-known.

But Longhi knew.

I realized right away that I was in for a treat in the first (poorly lit) gallery of trecento works (XIV Century). (All the galleries are poorly lit; in fact most of the museums in Italy are poorly lit.) These were works I had never seen by artists I had never heard of, each with a particular genius. Cristoforo Moretti, from Cremona, painted in the XV century. His "Santa Lucia" is an innocent young girl holding a plate with her eyes on it looking like a Carnevale mask dropped on a table.

Battista del Moro, who painted in the mid 1500s is represented by a Judith with the head of Holofernes; she is ripe, sumptuous, and calls to mind a Renoir Grand Dame in her opera box. Giovanni Luteria (Ferrara 1489-1542) is represented by a boy with a bunch of flowers who exuberantly bursts from the canvas like a Chagall lover with bouquet.

The Caravaggio is extraordinary in so many ways I won't even start, except to say that the point of view is filled with drama; we are looking up into the boy's expression of startled surprise and stupefaction. Caravaggio is photographically realistic down to the open window reflected in the glass vase of roses and violets. The lizard is tangled in a bunch of fruit. Was the boy reaching for a grape or a fig when he was bitten? And who is he, so portentious with his crown of dark curls and his grape-stained lips? Another sublime Bacchus devoured by his demons?

There are two small Lottos, each of a saint painted in a niche. San Pietro martire reads placidly in his niche, unperturbed by the large knife buried in the top of his bald head; the Praying Dominican Saint appears to be dancing out of his niche, his eyes rolled back, heavenward, his white robe a subtle swirl of motion.

Bartolomeo Passerotti's (Bologna, 1529-1592) Le Pollarole features two chicken vendors crowded between racks of live and dead poultry. The older one clutches a fat, fine, full-feathered rooster, her face against his, his eyes alert to the moment. The younger woman sits beside her in a green dress holding a large dead turkey, half plucked. Their juxtaposition is ironic. Is this a complex allgeory of youth and old age, or are they just a mother-daughter act?

Ribera's San Tommaso was almost Japanese in its simplicity, modern in line, concept and composition. It brought to mind the humble monumentality of Diego Rivera's Mexican peasants. The Mater Dolorosa is reduced to her upturned face and her hands clasped in prayer; everything else fades to black.

There were many more, each worth the time spent looking, and I couldn't help thinking about Roberto Longhi being able to hang any one he wanted in his living room or bedroom. Some people have all the luck!!

Double Whammy

2009-12-19T04:18:00.000-08:00

I woke up, looked outside, and the garden was covered with several inches of snow.

My response was to put on several layers of clothing and my wellies and head out with my camera.

On my side of the Accademia Bridge it wasn't apparent yet, but on the San Marco side it was obvious. Then I remembered the text message I had received the day before. Distracted by the snow, I had forgotten. Acqua alta. 130cm.

That only made it more interesting. I headed toward San Marco. Snow-covered boats lined the canals. By Campo San Moise the elevated walkways were up; the rising tidal surge met the snow like the sea meets sand.

Piazza San Marco, relatively deserted, was of course underwater. It doesn't take much to flood Piazza San Marco. The walkways traced a curious circuit around the Piazza, the Piazzetta, the Molo.

Salt had already been laid on a few of the big bridges and the walkways have a gritty surface, but the paving stones and stairs of the unsalted streets and bridges required extreme caution. Street cleaners in orange jumpsuits were out, scraping at embedded snow and ice with their shovels.

By Rialto the flood waters had already washed over the Riva del Carbon. The vaporettos were running on schedule. On the vaporetto I heard the sirens go off. It hadn't peaked yet. There was more to come. I was glad to be on my way home.

SEE FOR YOURSELF

Mindf**k in Castelfranco Veneto

2009-12-18T11:13:00.000-08:00

"La Tempesta," Giorgione, 1506-8
I didn't set out to go to an art exhibit. I went to Castelfranco this morning to verify the schedule for the buses from Castelfranco to Villa Barbaro in Maser. That sounds easy, however, it isn't and nobody seemed to know anything for sure. But on my way from the station I noticed that there is a big Giorgione show at the Casa Giorgione, next to the Duomo in the center of the old walled town.

Briefly, Giorgione (1478-1510) was born in Castelfranco, flowered early and died young. Like Rafaello and Caravaggio, his genius was of a different order of magnitude than the brief years of his life. There are only five works that he indisputably painted, several others which the experts are reasonably certain he painted, and some others he may have painted. As with all great geniuses, you know it when you see it; the real thing glows with an unearthly beauty, and the "maybe" real, or the expert copies by such other geniuses as Tiziano, bask in the reflected glory.

It is generally agreed that Giorgione studied under the old and towering power of Giovanni Bellini; some hold that both Tiziano and Giorgione studied under Bellini at the same time. Giorgione shows the influence of Bellini but his was a genius of a different order altogether.

Giorgione was a revolutionary.

Until he painted, the work of all painters was divided into two neat categories: religious (or mythological) scenes and portraits. The figures -- and their messages and morals, or their egos in the case of the portraits -- took stage center. Landscapes were in the background. The great renaissance artists lavished loving attention on these backgrounds; they became increasingly detailed, with all manner of flora and fauna and realistic or fantastic buildings and ruins, or raw nature-- mountain crags and tropical Edens. But they were always only that, backgrounds. Nobody painted nature for the sake of painting nature, but only as settings for the people who were the center of attention, and every painterly skill was used and developed to draw attention to them.

With a single painting, Giorgione blew all that up. "La Tempesta" (above) was like a molotov cocktail lobbed into the symmetrical, harmonious, classical imaginative world of the renaissance. Suddenly the background became the subject: the majestic sky, the cityscape and the river, the trees and the reflections in the water and the lightning that looks like sun tearing open a seam in the clouds. The figures are discrete, mysterious, their presence, both alone and together, open to endless interpretation; they are a part of the picture. They are not its center.

Brave new world. Art changes forever as the background moves to the foreground.

But Giorgione, in addition to inventing the "paesaggio," the landscape painting, also painted portraits, and here his contribution is mood, affect, and especially, "la melanconia" -- melancholy. Instead of looking robust, demure, posed, classical, his portraits sigh with wistfulness and longing and the mysteries of the heart.

Besides the few Giorgione paintings, the exhibition is filled with other treasures such as Durer prints of both plants and animals, paintings by Tiziano, Sebastiano del Piombo, Giovanni Bellini, Perugino, Rafaello, and the heretofore unknown to me and stunningly wonderful Giulio Campagnola. Even the fragment of carved stone by an anonymous Venetian artisan is more expressive than whole rooms at museums I've been to. It is possible that Durer, considered the greatest artist of the northern renaissance, met Giorgione during his visits to Bellini's studio.

For me, the most touching of the additional works are watercolors painted in 1896 of what remained at that time of the frescoes Giorgione and Tiziano painted on the walls of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the German trade association, on the Grand Canal (today the main post office). These frescoes have entirely vanished. We have the sketchiest remains and ideas of what they looked like; what they might have been is forever left to our imaginations. The water colors are a fragmentary record of that particular paradise lost.

But what lives in the imagination thrives. We are blessed with the images that remain, and for the galvanic impact they had on all subsequent art, and while we cannot know, our imaginations can suggest the splendor of those frescoed walls lit by the sunlight or moonlight reflected in the Grand Canal.

It is always staggering to walk out of an art show and stand amid the buildings in the paintings. Italy offers that beautiful dissonance in abundance. From the Casa Giorgione you walk around the Duomo to see the Pala Giorgione, the altarpiece Giorgione painted in 1505. It isn't where it was painted to be; it is in a side chapel of the Duomo which, on a cold December day, is like a refrigerator. The melancholy beauty of the faces, the jewel-like splendor of the fabrics and the hills upon which the walled city stands in the distance, make you forget the temperature, the time, and just about everything else during that delicious moment, however long it lasts.

That is what art is all about.

"Doppio Ritratto (Double Portrait)", Giorgione, 1502

Venetian Efficiency | Venetian Sublime

2009-12-13T11:52:00.000-08:00

Last Sunday I went to the Church of San Salvador for a performance of Tchaikovsky's Liturgy for San Giovanni Grisostomo. I was struck by two things; first, the deep Russian-ness, the unique sound of Russain liturgical music, closer to the Byzantine than to the Roman. Secondly, that music expresses the inexpressible. This is clearest in purely instrumental music, but this music, with a liturgical text sung a capella by a small choir with male soloists, enables us to experience what the words alone attempt, and necessarily fail, to express. That is to say, we experience of the sublime. We hear the music and feel its presence; it fills our senses in a way our minds can understand.

In the church I noticed a poster for a series of organ concerts, vespri d'organi, at the Basilica di San Marco and made a mental note to go on Tuesday at 17:00. On Monday afternoon I wondered if there might be a concert on Monday. San Salvador was closed when I went by, and since I had to go through Piazza San Marco I stopped at the tourist office. I hadn't seen the posters anywhere else.

The woman behind the counter was nice enough. I told her I couldn't find any information on the organ concerts at San Marco.

Surely I was mistaken, she said. There is no organ at San Marco. She was quite emphatic, and suggested that perhaps I meant Salute.

I told her I knew about the vespri d'organo at Salute, but that this was different. She shuffled through her catalog and shook her head. There aren't even any at Salute in December, she said, as though a bit puzzled. At any rate she assured me that there couldn't be an organ concert in San Marco because there is no organ. I couldn't remember having seen one there and deferred to her superior knowledge.

This afternoon I went to the flea market at Campo Santa Maria Novella. (A guy was selling 70's leather bags. I was tempted to buy a brown leather borsetta with two buckles, very snappy, for 35E but got sidetracked and didn't. Have to see if he's there next Sunday!) On my way home I passed through Piazza San Marco. There was absolutely no line for the Basilica, and I always take advantage of such opportunities. The sun was out and the light was good. The interior was wonderfully luminous. (I won't go into it here. I will only say that repeated viewings always pay off; I'm never sorry I stopped in.) I noticed, in the left chancel arch, organ pipes. The lady at the tourist office had been so emphatic; but there it was. There were more pipes on the other side. It is a considerable organ that doesn't exist.

I went to the Chapel of St. Isidore where you can sit down because I wanted to make some notes. On a bannister were handouts for the vespri d'organi. It was the same program as I had seen on the poster in San Salvador. These were the concerts that didn't exist on the non-existent organ. I decided to come back for the concert, and thought about going to the tourist office tomorrow and pointing out to the lady that San Marco indeed has a quite an organ, and the vespri d'organo are there in December, not at Salute, which is why there were none in Salute. She works for the city; she is the source of last resort for people looking for things in the city. She should, one would think, have a clue. If she's there, I will stop in.

By the by, the vespri d'organo was interesting, less because of the organ than because every opportunity to see the interior of the basilica lit up is an opportunity worth taking. A few brief comments here; I will go on and on on my own time.

The gold background of the mosaics make the images seem more artificial, but they also reflect light. They illumate the figures in the foreground, giving them a more dramatic reality, not a naturalistic one. The basilica, because it is Byzantine, is the monument in Venice which most lacks windows; there are many, but not enough to entirely illuminate all the mosaics which are maddeningly difficult to see even under the best of circumstances. Artificial illumination is required. Well lit, the "Christ blessing" in the cove above the apse, though late (but to an old design), is a crown of creation, a great big "hell, yeah!" for human artistry.

The organist played sections of Bach's Art of Fugue. I am quite certain he is the same organist I heard playing Art of Fugue at Salute a few weeks back, perhaps rehearsing, afternoons around 4. A couple times at Salute he got lost and trailed off into improvisatory vamping. Tonight he played the sections straight. I know that the organ is a fiercely difficult instrument to play, requiring both hands and feet; but I couldn't follow the fugal structure. This may in part have to do with the fact that the echo-ey five dome structure of the basilica is inhospitable to this music; Bach's clean interweaving lines are smudged over by the long reverb of the basilica's domes and arches. I checked when I got home; I could follow the lines on my recording, so it wasn't just me...

How I Remember It

2009-12-11T06:44:00.000-08:00

The opium came from Paul, the guy at the record store. He laid it on me just to be cool. He had worked in the kitchen of an ashram in India. When he invited me over for curry, he neglected to tell me that they had been making it a little hotter each day since they got back, twenty-eight days earlier. My entire digestive system, including my lips and tongue, were scorched.

You showed up at my place a couple days later. You were all fired up about a demonstration on campus. You heard about it from your Black Panther friend. I think that's when you were living in the rented room next door to Eldridge Cleaver's apartment-headquarters in the San Francisco's Fillmore district. Correct me if I'm wrong.

This particular wave of protest had begun on the California State University campus and spread to Berkeley instead of the other way around. Led by the Third World Liberation Front, a coalition of SDS and the Black Panthers, and others all representing the vast non-white communities, the student strike at State made S. I. Hayakawa, its president, a darling of the Right Wing. Before becoming President of SF State, Hayakowa, an English professor there, had led a voter's crusade against all digit-dialing, demanding letter prefixes remain. As a result of the Student Strike, he was nationally known overnight and went on to become a State Senator. It's gratifying to know that we still have all-digit dialing. His greatest moment was pulling the plug on the sound system and bringing in the National Guard.

The Third World Liberation Front were demanding, inter alia, an end to racism at the university, the creation of a Black Studies Department, and an end to the Vietnam War. Looking back, they got two out of three.

The demonstrators on the Berkeley campus eventually met the massed forces of the Berkeley Police and the dreaded Oakland Tac Squad, the Blue Meanies (named for their blue jumpsuits) with their body armour and heavy artillery. Who knows who all was there? The FBI, the National Guard, the CIA, the Red Squads, assorted provocateurs and plants and the just plain crazy, all mixed in with the ideologues who were there for cause.

The police flushed the demonstration off the campus onto Telegraph Avenue. Then they advanced down Telegraph Avenue in a solid phalax with guns and gas masks. Special cars preceded them, pipes coming out of their windows, pepperfoggers, spraying the crowd with tear gas. Hipper store owners left buckets of water and paper towels outside their doors; used together, they created a sort of protective mask. This show of support was also a propitiatory offering to the lords of window-breaking and looting.

The people who had earlier been marching in solid ranks wearing leather jackets and snappy dashikis, chanting "Ungh! Ungawa! Third World Power!" were now rampaging down the streets, hurling everything that came in hand, screaming "Power to the People!"

We skirted the edge, emerging on Telegraph Avenue at Dwight Way, several blocks from the volcano, but the chaos was spilling toward us like flaming lava. You picked up a brick and put it in the pocket of your jacket and said "let's go up there," pointing toward the rooftops overlooking Telegraph.

It wasn't hard to find the stairway to the roof. I had lived in the second floor apartment during my sophomore year. We climbed up past the third floor to the roof, which was flat save for a low brick wall on the street sides. In the rear the building abutted an uneven terrain of roofs and television aerials.

You edged toward the street, glaring down at the Police with fierce hatred. My outrage at injustice was beginning to fray; you were propelled by a more powerful engine.

The teargas preceding the confrontation had begun to reach us. There wasn't a lot of time to equivocate. You waited only until the first Police car was in range, and hurled the brick at it.

The impact was seismic, spreading in jolting, instantaneous waves. All eyes turned up. Within seconds Police were in the street door and pounding up the stairs. You looked at me and I looked at you, and then we both started running as fast as we could.

The Police hit our roof just as we hit the roof next door in a loud thud and sprawl. You tell me if their guns were raised; that's what I saw. There was a gap between us and the next roof, a gap that didn't seem to matter very much as we hurled ourselves at it.

About four buildings on we made it to the street and kept running all the way to your car, parked far enough that we could still get away once we got to it, a beat-up VW bug. We had to push it to jump start it and prayed there was enough gas to get us out, but once it fired up it got us to my apartment near San Pablo.

We were insane with buzz; sheer adrenalin, paranoia, exulatation. We smoked more pot and opium and had much sex and then some take out Chinese food.

It was the same roof where James Rector was famously shot after the Third World Riots ebbed and People's Park hit flood tide.

A few days later we ran into Kathy at the MDR in North Beach. She was with Jim, and they told us about The Advisory in the old Kingsbury mansion in the heart of Pacific Heights, and mayhem ensued.

The Stones of Assisi (and Urbino)

2009-11-27T12:38:00.000-08:00

Between Bologna and Firenze, the Eurostar crosses the Appenines, the spine of mountains that runs the length of the boot of Italy. The mountains rise and fall like the waves of a green and rocky sea. The peaks of these mountains are craggy and erose; buildings cling to their sides or crown their peaks.

The Veneto and Emilia-Romagna were grey, grey, grey. Grey clouds, grey fog, grey light. The Eurostar enters one of many tunnels cut through the mountain; when it comes out on the other side the bright Tuscan sun floods the hillsides with light.

I am on my way to Assisi. I change trains at Florence Santa Maria Novella. No more Eurostar; I am now on an Interregionale which stops at every stop. It took two and a half hours to travel from Venice to Florence. It will take another two and a half to Assisi, half the distance. But if you grab a window seat it is a ride well worth enjoying. Descending into Umbria, the train winds between the base of the mountains and the Spoleto Valley at their feet. You skirt Lake Trasimeno, which is vast and beautiful, ringed with hills and grassy plain. Olive trees are everywhere, and the strange cachi -- persimmons -- whose fruit hangs like orange bulbs on the bare and skeletal limbs long after the leaves have fallen.

The Basilica di San Francesco in Assisi is one of my favorite places. What strikes me, each time, is how festive the interior is. Even the dark lower basilica is decorated for a party in geometric pastel festoons painted in wet plaster seven hundred years ago.

The last time I was here the apse behind the altar of the lower basilica was hidden by scaffolding, undergoing restoration. Today it is finished, and beautifully lit. Like the basilica itself it is peculiarly brilliant, unlike anything else. The colors appear freshly painted. It is amazing that pigments mixed with wet plaster seven centuries ago could become this durable. In many places, almost entirely in Venice, they have crumbled or faded; it's a matter of microclimates. When an earthquake shook this basilica several of the ceiling frescoes in the transept collapsed. The fragments were gathered to the last speck of dust, and they were lovingly restored as best as humanly possible. Fortunately most of the frescoes were spared.

The apsidal fresco in the lower basilica is much later than the Giottos upstairs. There are heroic Renaissance figures amid the late medieval throngs. Veronese meets El Greco in a painting that stylistically would not look out of place amid the Orozco and Sequieros domes painted in Guadalajara six centuries later. Stylewise. But the messages could not be more opposite. Orozco painted fiery hells, but they were the lurid industrial furnaces of capitalism; the angels and saints were Marx and Engels and Lenin. Here, Hell and Death writhe at the bottom. Above, amid bugles and trumpets and angels hovering like birds, is Christ triumphant. The two worlds meet along the center meridian of the fresco, which draws an arc around you. That is the point of tangency where heaven meets earth, and it is mediated by friars of the Minor Order which Saint Frances founded. The Franciscan brothers are lowering ropes down into the torment of purgatory, to rescue lost and desperate souls.

The oldest stone in Assisi, pink stone hewn from Mount Subasio, has never seen plaster. The stonework is solidly medieval but inextricably commingled with the earlier Roman masonry. The medieval stones are eccentrically well put together. These stonemasons were bold and imaginative, amusing themselves with clever, ever shifting patterns to make the walls more interesting.

The basilica of San Francesco was built upon a rocky spur of steep hillside, like the prow of a ship cutting into the flat plain below. It required an immense superstructure to create the flat floor of the upper basilica. The floor of the lower basilica, directly beneath, slopes down like a ramp toward the apse. As a result the side chapels are reached by increasing numbers of steeply pitched stairs. What they lacked in light they made up for in a mad profusion of painted color and stained glass, as brilliant today as it was in 1330.

Both basilicas, upper and lower, are decorated inside with frescos; the outside is simple, with masses of stonework only around the portal and the rose window above it. It is utter simplicity, and it is close to perfect. You have to stand back and see it in context to appreciate the scale of the imagination required to build. You can best appreciate its splendid audacity from high above, from Rocca Maggiore, the castle fortress high above the town.

Ruskin was right that you can read the stones like a book. They tell the story of a place and time and were intended to do so forever.

Ruskin was a Christian moralist and this colors his thinking, but his eye was invariably clear and true. One of his assertions in this vein is that the ratios and proportions of classical architecture -- Egyptian, Greek, Roman -- their rigid regularity and symmetry, results from the fact that they were built by slaves. The artists were not free to indulge in flights of fancy; their imaginations were as fettered as their limbs.

That is why he maintains that the peculiar glory of the Gothic is that the artisans were free, both in the material circumstances of their lives and in the lives of their minds. They were free to sculpt and carve whatever they loved and found beautiful and amazing in the natural world. It was a sublime exercise of free will. This was certainly true in Venice, par excellence, which is Ruskin's point. The stones of Assisi, however, tell their story differently, and, perhaps most importantly, their interior surfaces are still plastered over with some of the most amazing pictorial art ever conceived and drawn by human hand.

The Porziuncola is a stone church the size of a suburban dining room. It was given by the Bishop of Monte Subasio to Francis and his band of brothers if they accepted it as the seat of their order. It was in ruins on the plains below the city; they were effectively banished from the life of the city to practice their vocation in splendid isolation. Francis and the brothers restored it with their own hands, stone by stone.

The silhouette of the Porziuncola is such perfect gothic that Ruskin could have built it himself. The doorway arch is pointed ever so gently; the outer roof is a sharp high gable and the inner roof is a stone barrel vault. It is the humblest of structures.

Santa Maria degli Angeli is a meretricious baroque basilica that sits atop the Porziuncola. It is like a Faberge easter egg, a gaudy outer shell encasing a perfect gem inside. This easter egg demonstrates quite vividly what Saint Francis was originally and what the Church quickly turned him into. Once the Porziuncola stood alone, a beacon of saintly poverty. Now suburbs sprawl around it, and the train station and MacDonald's, and, encasing it, S. M. degli Angeli with its parklike surrounds.

Walking along the flank of S. M. degli Angeli, taking its measure, I crossed the street to see it better; on the wall beside me I saw a stone plaque with the Medici coat-of-arms: a shield with a circular arrangement of six balls. I thought I must be mistaken. We are in Umbria, not Tuscany. I crossed the street to see a fountain running along the basilica wall. There were 20 or 30 spigots and at the end, embedded in the wall, a small plaque: Fonti Medicee sec. XVI-XVII. The Medici fountains, high renaissance. The dynasts left their imprint in the holiest of places.

These walled hilltop towns were built for defense; the hillsides and the plains below were cultivated, the farmers dependent upon the military power and prestige of the city above.

The medieval city of Assisi was literally built upon the Roman city whose foundations and street levels can be seen in many places, nowhere more clearly than the Museo del Foro Romano, the Roman Forum museum, located under the present Piazza del Comune. Here you see the original foundations of the square, with the temple of Minerva at its center whose facade still fronts the piazza above. High above the square stands the fortress, then as now, refortified as a bastion of the Papal State in the 14th century.

The Roman Forum Museum has sculpture and fragmentary remains of Roman stonework, but is distinguished by the Roman masonry itself. From the signage:

East monumental fountain
Placed in the East part of the terracing wall, the fountain consists of two rooms with a connecting archway. The walls are built in travertine opus quadratum with barrel vault. The front face shows two arches and a large monolithic travertine slab.

The Tetrastyle
The tetrastyle, an aedicule [a platform framed by columns] made up of four pink limestone columns holding the statues of the Diosscuri dates to the first half of the First Century A.D. It completes the central terracing building project which took more than a hundred years to finish.

You can only marvel at the elegance and precision with which these stones are laid, how strong and sound they still seem two thousand years later. They were built to last, and they did.

Elsewhere in the museum they have computer generated simulations of the Roman Forum, both still photos and a video walk-through. There you can see how the medieval city fits atop the Roman like a porcelain cap and intermingles their stones. The existing Roman masonry, uncannily precise, impossibly strong, is rigorously regular. Later, the gothic stonemasons made their walls in complex and irregular patterns pieced together from smaller stones and bricks; in comparison, they are infinitely varied and felicitous.

Ruskin was right.

Urbino is located in Le Marche -- the Marches -- the province bounded on the north by Emilia-Romagna, on the west by Tuscany and Umbria, on the south by Abruzzi, and on the east by the Adriatic Sea; it is in the approximate center of the eastern coast of the boot.

From Assisi I took the train to Foligno and transferred to an InterCity to Falcone Marittima. The train follows a pass through the Appenines down to the sea at Faro which was the key Roman port on the Adriatic. At Faro I transferred to Pesaro and from Pesaro I took a bus.

I am standing high on a hilltop surrounded on all sides by a sea of hills and mountains; there are no plains here, only variegated hillsids and scarps of granite. This was the seat of the Montefeltros, the dynasts who ruled these hillside towns, orchards and vineyards for several hundred years. The current city owes its fame and its form to Federico da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino from 1444-1482. He built the massive Palazzo Ducale and Duomo which dominate the town and are its distinctive landmark.

The city is also the site of the University of Urbino, founded in 1506. Today Urbino is the college town par excellence, filled with students, the university having taken the place of the Ducal court as the center of its vitality.

The Duomo, of later date, rotated 90 degrees from its medieval predecessor, is straight Palladio in inspiration. But its interior walls are paneled in pastel pistachio stucco. It makes the place feel more gay than somber. The pulpit, positioned above the nave on a stone pier, is covered with baroque stucco work like white icing on a cake of pale pistachio marzipan. It is perfectly way-too-much.

I sit. But for me, the place is deserted. The images and impact of the past few days collapse inward and I am face to face with the bare essence. The place itself, its design and its imagery, compel me to think about religion; the duomo posits a dogma with a Counter-reformation Baroque sugar-coating.

In all cultures, at all times, the loftiest and lovliest work was put into the temples and the basilicas. At its best, it is a gesture of gratitude to the spirit that animates the universe; at its worst it enforces a rigid code of exclusionary clauses demanding strict adherence to its own language and rituals.

But no, I think... Did only St. Francis get it right? Religion -- worship -- should begin with joy, the joy a child feels watching a butterfly emerge from its cocoon and flutter up into the sunlight on jeweled wings.

Religion should be the safety net, the unbreakable skein, supported by the understanding that suffering can not, and need not, be justified or eliminated; put simply, it is. It occurs on every level of sentient life and is part of a continuum with ecstasy at its opposite pole.

Religion should begin in joy and it should end in forgiveness, forgiveness of all things. That's a really tough proposition. It is much easier to envision excruciating hell for those who have harmed us, but we have to be able to let that go, too. It is all, Buddha said, a veil of illusion. The most difficult and the most rewarding peace arises not from justice -- however conceived and delivered -- but from compassion, infinite compassion.

As I sit here scribbling this in my notebook a choir of monks somewhere beyond the apse are singing plain chant. It echoes softly in the baroque faux-Palladio vaults, hanging in the air like a soft breeze.

It brings tears to my eyes and induces a feeling that I would like to last a long, long time, a kind of euphoria, the ecstasy of simply being alive, sentient, capable of experiencing and appreciating such beauty.

Ruskin believed that the beauty of the greatest works of man, the gothic structures and ornamentation, were so precisely because of the joy the artisans felt in their freedom to create the most beautiful stonework they could imagine. They could not rival Nature, but they could pay it homage, devout, humorous, sensual, mundane, from the angel blowing his trumpet on high to the loyal dog at the portal base baring his teeth. That is what Ruskin believed they were doing.

We might imagine that we are, each and every one of us, stonemasons. Our task in life is to fashion and to embellish it, to make it rich and beautiful, filled with love and gratitude. The work is so fulfilling and exhilarating that we can endure the pain and the sorrow life inevitably brings. We really aren't in this alone; we are in it together. We carve more than just our piece. My piece fits with your piece to build an exceptional piece neither of us could have built alone. Then multiply that by everyone you know and everyone they know.

That is how a gothic cathedral was built, over the centuries, by generations of families who lived and died without ever seeing it completed. The greatest buildings freely-built consumed lifetimes in their construction and decoration. That is why they are neither uniform nor symmetrical; they are as varied and complex as life itself.

Here is how it works for me: I am sitting in an outdoor cafe down the hill from the duomo. I am having a caffe macchiato and a brioche al cioccolata. I am surrounded by university students who have finished classes for the day. The air is charged with their ebullience. Across the street are two stupendous renaissance stone portals. Downhill the square is teeming with people chatting, waiting for buses, hanging out. The Christmas lights just went up and are switched on for the first time. It is also going-home-from-work time, which is inherently festive. It is an absolutely perfect moment. Is it all there is? No. Is it all I want? No. But it is the moment I have, and it is perfect. I want to share it with you, and this is how I do it. I am carving my stones.

The strange turrets of the Palazzo Ducale, the iconic image of Urbino, are tall and pink and slightly effete. I understand what Ruskin means when he speaks of the masculine energy of the best architecture. He is not being a sexist. To him it was clear that although the urge to build was shared, the task of building fell on the men. The women sent the men off to carve stone that would last throughout the ages, to shelter them and to celebrate them. It was men's particular genius. When she was a brilliant thinker, in Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia made the same point throughout the long arc from ancient Egypt, through classical Greece, to Imperial Rome.

Ruskin says it best. In judging if a building is good, "First, see if it looks as if it had been built by strong men; if it has the sort of roughness, and largeness, and nonchalance, mixed in places with the exquisite tenderness which seems always to be the sign-manual of the broad vision, and massy power of men who can see past the work they are doing, and betray here and there something like disdain for it."

Masculinity is an interesting quality. It is cultural and it varies. The Italian brand, for example, is far less aggressive than American macho. The Italians seem a quiet breed given to heights of passionate hysteria. Theirs is a softer, rounded masculinity, buffed by history and time. It allows for the physical closeness and open affection men routinely display toward one another, from the gentlest camaraderie, holding hands and kissing, to the most exuberant horseplay. It is a coat of many colors. They queue patiently, they argue passionately, they carefully savor a tiny cup of espresso, dress with attention to detail, and speak musically, drawing the logic with their hands like a conductor. It's when you see this that you can understand what Ruskin meant by the masculinity of great architecture.

Raffaello Santi was a greater painter than his father Giovanni, but seeing Giovanni's work reveals a direct line of artistry. Raffaello's genius did not burst from nowhere, comet-like. He was his father's son, but a generation later, freer, more sensual and closer to the reality of the natural world which is the archetype of all beauty. Giovanni's best figures look like particularly well-executed waxworks. Raffaello's breathe. Giovanni worked within the formal constraints of early Renaissance perspective. Raffaello reinvented them in voluptuous curves and swirling fabrics.

A bit further on in the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, located in the Palazzo Ducale, is the "Flagellation" of Piero della Francesca. First and foremost, Piero had style. His work is instantly recognizable. Yes, for all its complex perspective, what truly speaks are faces and expressions, so much more alive than the architectonic composition. It represents the transition from an earlier, freer medieval style of painting -- the Giotto frescoes at San Francesco for example -- to the highly composed and ordered style of the renaissance.

Was the gothic the Golden Age? Was the Renaissance? Was there ever really a "Golden Age"?

It seems there were many Golden Ages, in different times and places. In all cases what they shared in common was the momentary flowering of human genius in all its forms of expression. We make fetishes of these moments, forgetting that in all times and in all places something is arising and something is dying. Which is what is often only clear in retrospect.

The virtue of architecture and of art is that it fixes these moments, so that in other places and at other times we can read the story of genius in flower, of its rise and fall, and perhaps better understand our place in the big picture.

This seems perfectly clear to me, sitting deep in the basement of Federico da Montefeltro's Palazzo Ducale in Urbino. It was blindingly clear in the basilica of San Francesco in Assisi.

A multimedia show is being projected on the low vaults of the service basement beneath the ramparts and towers, projected all around, evoking the glories of Federico's court, which was, by all accounts, an exceptionally brilliant one. Wit, intellect, genius, all gathered; the library was full of gorgeous books, the walls emblazoned with art, the rooms filled with brilliant minds. Its particular genius was local, rooted in these craggy mountains and green hillsides. Wisdom and virtue, greed and lust, war and politics did their dance until greed and lust, war and politics, blew out its light and the light appeared elsewhere, as surprising there as it was here, and as brief.

"Golden Ages," like perfection itself, are simply ideas. History indicates that all efforts at perfection are doomed to fail. Perfection is an ideal that dwells in the realm of the mind. It provides something unattainable to aspire to. We may never get there, but we can come dangerously close, in our art, in our buildings, and in our minds and hearts. Like all greatness, it begins with love and ends with compassion, and is an expression of gratitude for the opportunity to experience the sublime.

GALLERY: THE STONES OF ASSISI AND URBINO

Larry Mellman
Assisi | Urbino | Venezia
26.XI.09

Nightscapes, Castello

2009-11-18T00:51:00.001-08:00

There was a bit of fog. The water was still and the tide was high as I wandered through Castello around midnight.

CASTELLO NIGHTSCAPES

Villa Pisani | Xanadu on the Brenta

2009-11-12T12:39:00.001-08:00

Alvise Pisani, the 114th Doge of the Republic of Venice set out to build, on the green banks of the Brenta River, an earthly paradise to showcase his wealth and power.

He built his Xanadu at Stra, only 15 miles from Venice, but it was fraught with peril and filled with intrigue. Every Eden has its serpent with the power to bring the whole house down. In this case, the house stood, but the Venetian Republic crashed down around it. Villa Pisani was built as the thousand-year old Republic teetered on the brink of financial, political and historical collapse. Napoleon merely knocked over a house of cards; it had already collapsed from within.

Napoleon made his stepson, Eugene Beauharnais, the Prince of Venice and Viceroy of Italy, and gave him Villa Pisani. The villa was Napoleonized, although Napoleon only stayed a night or two. The gardens remained much as old Alvise Pisani had wanted them, a fabulous playground to rival the gardens of Versailles in fascination if not in size.

The facade of the villa, the first thing you see as you round the bend along the Riviera del Brenta, is conspicuously modeled after the Palace at Versailles, on a smaller scale. It represents a sad reflux, where Italian structural genius, so apparent in Venice itself, stops being original and begins aping its imitators. It is a poor imitation, not without grandeur, but lacking integrity, the soul stroke of genius the four caryatids that flank the portal. It is entirely devoid of the animating spirit of Venice's greatest buildings, first and foremost the Ducal Palace, the basilica of San Marco, the great Gothic palaces, then the Palladio churches, Santa Maria della Salute and Longhena's baroque palaces. Those buildings were innovative and brilliant both in scope and in conception. In comparison, Villa Pisani is conservative, imitative, frivolous: it represents exhausted wealth. The economic engine had run out of gas, or, more accurately, the great wealth was changing hands, first to Napoleon and the French, then to the Austrians, and, finally back to the Italians themselves, somewhat depleted. Villa Pisani represents the bella figura, the glittering mask with which the tottering Venetian Republic attempted to hide its bankruptcy.

Of course everything is relative. Pisani was rich enough to bribe the 41 electors to elect him Doge. But in periods of decadence, which precede the fall, the wealth is so concentrated that everyday life is strangled and the extremities wither while the center still decks itself in jewels.

There are, in reality, several Villa Pisanis: the Villa of Alvise Pisani, a rococo fantasy extravaganza; the neoclassical Napoleonic villa, filled with imperial pretensions; and the Villa of the Austrian monarchs who got it from Napoleon, who enjoyed it, and who made it into a complex of bourgeoisified vacation apartments. It was also the site of the first meeting between Hitler and Mussolini. Imperial pretensions are all of a piece.

The particular beauty and the brilliance of Villa Pisani is the 30 acres of gardens. Here Pisani succeeded in creating a stately pleasure palace of immense proportions. The long reflecting pool, as at Versailles, extends from the rear portico of the Villa to the stables, the broad central axis of the gardens which surround it, containing "everything which gives pleasure to the sight and gratifies our taste," Pisani said.

There is, for example a coffee house, a small pavillion set atop a hill. But the hill is fake, and just below its grassy green surface are the arched ceiling vaults of an ice-house. It is said that during the summer the Venetians enjoyed sitting in this pavillion to cool their feet in the air vented up from below.

The kitchen gardens, later upgraded to French-style orangeries, provided a selection of citrus year round, so that the Pisanis never wanted for a glass of fresh orange juice.

The gardens are decorated with arches and statuary set amid the trees and shrubs. Every where you look is a view. No corner is simply a corner, each is a pavillion, a triumphal arch, a marble niche, a grape-covered arbor.

The purpose of this garden was to divert, to dazzle, to amuse and delight. This is most perfectly seen in the maze and the exedra.

The maze is a labyrinth of hedges with a two-story tower at its center, topped by a statue of Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom. The gardens and the maze were built before the Villa itself; they were the essence of Pisani's dream.

Composed of nine concentric circles, the maze surrounds the tower. You can see it, but getting there is not so easy. The statue of Minerva atop the tower was an essential point of reference without which even the most intrepid gamester might not find his way. And Gerolamo Frigimelica, who designed the maze as well as the stables and the exedra, thought of everything. A double-helix stairway winds up and down the tower. It is a brilliant conception. The twin spiral stairs are the twisted end of the maze itself, offering an infinite number of vistas as you ascend and descend.

The exedra is another clever concept with no purpose but to entertain. It is a playground structure for adults, comprised of six arches from which six paths lead into the gardens. A stairway within its central turret leads to a terrace embellished with twelve classical statues and offering garden vistas in every direction.

And there are vistas. Vista after vista. Everywhere you turn. Just when you've gotten over one swoon, you're into another. I visited on a chilly autumn day. The baroque trees were on fire with color, orange, red, yellow and pink. The sun was hot and the sky a flawless Tiepolo blue. (If you wanted to check you could go inside and look at the ceiling of the ballroom, a vast fresco by Tiepolo representing the Triumph of the Pisanis.) Many of the buildings are covered in marmorino, a stucco of marble dust or painted delicate pastels. Much of the stonework and statuary is first class, dating to the original building, though none is particularly brilliant in the manner of Bernini or Canova or the Gothic artisans of Venice's golden age.

Strolling through these gardens on such a day is a walk through Paradise, no doubt about it. The interior, however, is not so brilliant. There are some fine frescoes besides the ballroom ceiling, and some interesting details, but inside the sad lesson of history is evident. The villa is filled with imperial pretensions and Grand Gestures, and its relatively empty state is eloquent comment on those pretensions. Sic transit gloria mundi.

The Bedroom of the Viceregent, Amalia of Bavaria, stepdaughter-in-law to Napoleon, is especially beautiful. The walls are covered in a silk fabric of the Pisani period, 1735 or so, which the Austrians probably discovered in a storage bin and recycled. It is called "Indian," sprays of roses, peonies, liles and parrots, and exhibits Pisani's taste for exoticism so characteristic of the rococo period.

Decadence so extravagant brought to mind Shelley's "Ozymandias," which I quote in full because it is short and because it says everything about the men who build these Xanadus, monuments to their own glory, from the perspective of history.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".

VILLA PISANI: SEE FOR YOURSELF

Boka Bence, Lute Player

2009-11-10T14:12:00.000-08:00

Boka Bence, Accademia Bridge, night
I have been hearing him for the last four years, always in surprising places. I didn't know his name, and dubbed him The Lute Player. I always asked other people who live here if they have heard him; everyone had seen him somewhere at one time or another. Often on summer warm autumn nights I would hear him at the apex of the Rialto Bridge, elegantly bent over his lute, playing renaissance dances to an obliggato of boat wake and heels on the grey stone stairs. For one season he played frequently in Campo San Aponal and I would see him there often.

Usually I was going from one place to another and suddenly there he would be, tucked in a niche around a corner behind San Salvador or in the shade of Ca' Franchetti's wall crowned with fragrant bushes in the spring.

One day last week he was playing near my apartment, and I bought his CDs. His name is Boka Bence, he is Hungarian, and in addition to playing music from the Hungarian renaissance he plays his own dances, composed in the style of the Hungarian renaissance. It is a unique and enchanting sound.

What struck me most was how deeply he had mastered the renaissance style, and yet his own dances were not slavish imitations; they were subtle variations filtered through a modern sensibility, traditional and not.

First and foremost, they are dances. They lilt and leap and glide and sway and if you have a soul, they make you want to dance.

"You have so thoroughly mastered the style and idiom of the renaissance," I commented to him, and he spontaneously burst into a big grin. He appreciated the compliment.

"I have heard a lot renaissance music," I said, "but never Hungarian."

"They are..." He struggled to find the words in English, his Italian being on a par with mine. "Not so..." He touched the air and paused. "Not so far. Is that right? Far."

Different but identifiable, sharing common genes with the rest of the renaissance, which was already mature in Italy by the time it reached Hungary, but with a flavor all their own. Far not only in distance but in time. Far, but not so far. They still speak to the modern mind.

He started to play. The music echoed nicely on the brick and stucco walls of the tiny campiello just beyond the Guggenheim. Tourists walked by clutching maps and barely heard a note. Wheeled luggage clattered across the paving stones. Strollers stopped to listen and throw money in the lute case. He wore wool gloves with the fingers cut off so that he could play in the autumn chill.

He has two CDs. One is with a small instrumental and vocal ensemble devoted entirely to songs and dances of the Hungarian Renaissance. It is a piece of vanished time and Bence's solos are exquisite. But his own music on the CD entitled Dances is individual and poetic.

These renaissance tunes were the popular music of their time. From the streets to the royal courts and back to the streets again, they were defined and refined and transformed, driven by the rhythms of complex dance steps. They can be joyous, carefree, melancholy, sensual, simple, complex, sublime.

Between two of the dances I said, "I guess my question is this: do you think you were born in the wrong century?"

He laughed and nodded enthusiastically. "Yes. Very much."

"Me too," I said, "I just haven't found my century."

I asked how long he has been playing the lute. He said he played guitar for a long time first, and about ten years ago he switched to this lute which a friend had made for him.

There is a lot of music on the streets of Venice, especially when the weather is fine. It ranges from accordion players to rockabilly to gypsy fiddle jazz to the virtuoso of the water glasses to the man who plays the violin so badly that it is hard to believe he does not do so intentionally, because it is impossible to play an instrument that much and still be so bad.

Bence is at the head of the class. He offers something fresh and historic at the same time. Relativity soup, the renaissance channeled through a twenty-first century talent. It is rare and original, something you never find often enough.

Venice at Night

2009-11-08T14:18:00.000-08:00

This is about images, not words. These are a few of many, zone by zone. See VENICE AT NIGHT.

Rubelli | In a word, sumptuous

2009-11-03T13:31:00.000-08:00

IF you ever find yourself needing to reupholster a chair or cover a wall with a fabric as sumptuous as those in a Renaissance painting, go to Rubelli.

Rubelli is located at the Sant'Angelo vaporetto stop in the 15th century Palazzo Corner Spinelli, designed by Mauro Codussi who, along with the Lombardi family, introduced the language of the Renaissance to the stones of Venice.

And you won't just find traditional fabrics of silk brocades and cut velvets. There are plenty of those to choose from, but Rubelli also maintains a design studio in Marghera where modern fantasias on traditional themes are created. Within the last few years Rubelli has also acquired other lines of thoroughly modern fabrics and, in the case of Donghia, striking modern furniture as well. You can flip through the collections on their website.

It was hard to concentrate on the fabrics with such splendid views from the balconies outside the showrooms. My first visit was last week, with my friend Pip and two of her friends from Paris. We were given the Cook's Tour by Francesco Caradonna. Pip is a regular and regularly brings people there, and Francesco graciously opened all the doors and drawers for us.

In the office, with its Sansovino fireplace and intricately carved and painted wooden ceiling, Francesco pulled out swatches of historic luxury fabrics, pieces of extraordinary clothing centuries old, ancient ecclesiastical vestments. He showed us particular patterns, such as sprigs of caper berries, that Rubelli reproduced from these ancient fabrics in modern cut velvets, stressing the continuum not only of beauty but of quality.

I forgot my camera the first time, but not the second. When Pip called to say she was going back to Rubelli to pick up the fabric her friends had ordered, I grabbed my camera.

Francesco opened doors and turned lights on and off for me and then left me alone to take pictures. Every ten minutes the daylight seemed to change in those mysterious and enchanting late afternoon ways, reflecting off the Grand Canal and through the florid stonework tracery. It was hard to focus.

The fabrics themselves are striking in their range and extraordinary quality. Although Rubelli is traditionally a purveyor of tessuti per arredamento, upholstery and drapery goods, I have seen their fabrics used for costumes in baroque opera and they looked even better on bodies than they do on sofas and walls. With a little imagination, much of it could be worn to stunning effect. The instant Charlotte saw the silver linen she knew it would be a fabulous skirt.

The Donghia sofas, chairs and love seats are upholstered simply, but dramatically. I was particularly struck by the Donghia because I remembered them from LA, where years ago I had often admired the arresting designs in their West Hollywood showroom. The marriage of Rubelli and Donghia is certainly inspired, as are the scarlet or silver cut velvets and brocades that make the old chairs and walls shimmer like Veroneses.

SEE FOR YOURSELF

Rainy day, San Marco

2009-11-02T17:00:00.000-08:00

I ended up crossing San Marco on a rainy day. Much of the square was flooded, as was the atrium to the basilica. You entered on passarelle, the raised walkways over the water, but the line was short and I decided to see how it looked.

The experience is always astonishing. I had some questions I knew only Ruskin could answer and so I began rereading "The Stones of Venice," which is where I came across this which I have begun to truly understand:

""This looks somehwat like pride; but it is true humility, a trust that you have been so created as to enjoy what is fitting for you, and a willingness to be pleased, as it was intended you should be. It is the child's spirit, which we are most happy when we most recover; remaining wiser than children in our gratitude that we can still be pleased with a fair colour, or a dancing light. And, above all, do not try to make all these pleasures reasonable, nor to connect the delight which you take in ornament with that which you take in construction of usefulness. They have no connection; and every effort that you make to reason from one to the other will blunt your sense of beauty, or confuse it with sensations altogether inferior to it. You were made for enjoyment, and the world was filled with things which you will enjoy, unless you are too proud to be pleased by them, or too grasping to care for what you cannot turn to other account than mere delight. Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance; at least I suppose this quill I hold in my hand writes better than a peacock's would, and the peasants of Vevay, whose fields in spring time are as white with lilies as the Dent du Midi is with its snow, told me the hay was none the better for them."

SAN MARCO, RAINY DAY, GALLERY

Happy Halloween

2009-10-31T14:10:00.001-07:00

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Two hours at the Doge's Palace

2009-10-26T15:10:00.001-07:00

The Doge's Palace is pre-programmed. No more wandering around aimlessly; there is a well-travelled track from which it is difficult to deviate.

I knew what I wanted to see, but had to go through things I didn't want to see to get there. As often happens, I blundered into several perfect moments in which the building revealed itself to me in its full splendor.

The first stop on the route consists of several rooms with the original sculpture from the building's exterior, especially the decorative capitals and one spectacular section of the flower-like archwork that makes the windows so majestic. You can see their design clearly, at eye level, rather than cranning your neck from a distance.

The capitals of the columns, the broad neckband that funnels the weight of the building down through the columns to the floor, are wreathed with leaves. Scenes of daily life, from high to low, are nestled in these wreaths. They are studded with faces that were not carved for ideal beauty. This is what distinguishes them from antiquity before them and the renaissance after them. They represent, instead real life as it happened daily in all its countless permutations. Some of the faces are beautiful; some are grotesque. Most fall in between. They are the butcher, the baker, the soldier, the priest, the knight, the monarch, the saint. Everyone in the crowd is there.

Each is carved in his proper setting, nestled amid the thick acanthus leaves. He or she wears the appropriate dress for his or her station. If you follow around the capitals, they often tell stories. More often than not, however, they are an encyclopedia of human types. One capital features men of every known race while others display occupations arranged by category.

Farther on there is a fragment of a capital from a lower order column, with no people, no faces, rendered beautiful by the sumptuous curves of fat leaves.

From the Basin side of the first floor you can see San Giorgio Maggiore through the arches. You could not have seen it during the Byzantine and Gothic periods because it wasn't there. You would only have seen the island it was later built upon floating in the lagoon.

On the opposite side of the Rio wing, behind the Doge's apartments, the Palace abuts the apse of the basilica of San Marco. A passageway links the Doge's bedroom to what was, after all, his very own chapel. The rear view of that particular apse is revelatory.

The five-dome plan of San Marco was based on the Church of the Holy Apostles in Istanbul, then Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. The Church of the Apostles did not survive; its dilapidated ruins were later transformed into a mosque and there is no record of its original appearance except for an image from 1162 which shows the five dome profile. You need to look at San Marco to understand what the second greatest church of the Byzantines looked like.

The rear apse of San Marco was not decorated like the facades; the elegant lines of the brickwork are evident. You can see the Byzantine structure beneath the florid Gothic and Renaissances overlays, topped the great dome which covers the original smaller dome underneath with a crown of lead sheathing.

Think about any building. The floors are certainly simple: a flat surface. The roof is probably a pitched flat surface, the walls are vertical flat surfaces. Putting holes in these surfaces is a more complex problem, especially when you are building with brick. Because windows were difficult, they were found more often in public buildings and rich homes than in buildings devoted to work and to the people who did it. The massive windows were one of the glories of the Baths of Diocletian, designed specifically to woo a spoiled and fickle populace, and certainly captured the imagination of Palladio.

At the time the Doge's Palace was being built, other castles in Europe were armed fortresses, with square towers at the corners and thick brick and stone walls. The windows were few, small, often only narrow slits just wide enough to fire an arrow through. They were often on hilltops making them draughty, cold in the winter and cool but airless in the summer because there was no ventilation.

Compared to these in their countless permutations on terrafirma, the Doge's Palace is utterly fantastic. It is filled with windows. It was created to admit as much light as possible. In some places that was difficult, but the sides facing the basin and the piazetta have an extraordinary amount of windows open to the breezes and to the sun, and can be shuttered in the wet heat of July and August.

Even late in fall -- today is 26 October, and it is mid-afternoon -- the light in the Room of the Maggiore Consiglio is dazzling.

The Sala del Maggior Consiglio is overwhelming on several levels. First by its sheer size; it is 177 feet long, 82 feet wide and 50 feet high. A professional basketball court is 94 feet long and 50 feet wide. You could drop two of them into the Sala del Maggior Consiglio, which is as tall as a basketball court is wide.

Because it is flooded with light today, it is almost pointless to look at the oil on canvas paintings on the walls and ceilings. It is better simply to enjoy the space and the light. The room is a rectangle. Its long sides face the basin and the interior courtyard respectively. The far wall faces the piazzetta. Before the gold baroque woodwork of Venice's decline, these walls were covered with long vanished frescoes by the greatest masters of the late medieval and early renaissance periods.

The devastating fire in 1577 which almost totally destroyed that entire wing of the Doge's Palace happened at a very fortuitous time. Andrea Palladio was attempting to build in Venice the buildings of his dreams. He drew up plans for a new Rialto Bridge after the third wooden one burned burned down, a Roman market spanning the Grand Canal. After the fire, he drew plans for a new Doge's Palace , which would have remade it in Palladio's own image. His antagonist in this venture was Antonio da Ponte, the proto, or architectural czar, of the Republic. Da Ponte won. They used his design for the Rialto Bridge and he was put in charge of rebuilding at the Doge's Palace. Perhaps the fire was only an accident that opened the door of opportunity. Either way, it slammed shut in Palladio's face.

Another overwhelming feature of the Sala del Maggior Consiglio is its 14,000 square foot unsupported ceiling. There are no posts or columns; only the four walls. It is a Venetian creation, a shipbuilder's ceiling. It is an upside-down boat; the ceiling is the deck and the ribbing extends high up into the attic above. The timbers used for its construction were pickled in brine and dried to stone before they were assembled, and they bear the weight of the lead roofing. The upside-down ship is suspended, it hangs down over the room, resting only on the four walls, the stress transferred out and down the heavy outer walls of the building.

Using the deck of an upside-down boat for the ceiling of the Sala del Maggior Consiglio was not an innovation. They had been doing it in churches for centuries. But the scale of this ceiling was staggering, and, commensurate with its size, was the number of windows.

There are five windows under graceful gothic arches along the wall facing the basin. They are immense. The room is not as sublimely luminous as St. Chapelle with its walls of stained glass, but Sainte-Chapelle is only 114' by 36', half the size of the Sala del Maggior Consiglio, although it is a third taller. The Sala del Maggior Consiglio was designed to accommodate the full Major Counsel, which numbered up to 1,600 bodies; the entire male Venetian aristocracy over the age of 25.

The light through the windows is golden, a brilliant glare of sun and its watery reflections in the terrazzo floor. In those days, light was the ultimate luxury. The rich could afford windows, and in Venice the most singular feature of all the palaces is their windows. When the princes of Europe paid state visits, they were received in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio. How could they not draw the contrast between their dark and drafty castles and this stupendous space filled with air and light and the most beautiful paintings on the walls and ceilings.

On the one side the sun reflects off the green-blue water of the basin. On the other side there are only three windows, but they face the open inner courtyard of the palace and the bright blue sky over the domes and spires of San Marco. Two windows on the far wall catch the sun as it moves west. The long wall on the basin side faces southwest. Its five windows on the water are oriented toward the long arc of the sun rising over Lido and setting over the mainland.

There are only three windows on the couryard side because the place of the final two is occupied by the hall of the magistrature and the Sala del Scrutinio, the room in which the votes were counted when the Maggior Consiglio voted or elected a new Doge and other officials of the Republic.

There is a triumphal Roman arch at the far end of the Sala del Scrutinio. We are in the Renaissance where Imperial Rome still sets the bar for grandeur. A spectacularly large window opens onto the balcony over the Piazzetta.

Here, as throughout the Palace, two styles contend; gothic splendor and renaissance dreams of ancient Rome. You have to mentally strip away the encrustations of time and decadence to get back to the way these rooms felicitously created an exalted light-filled space decorated with frescoes.

The current paintings were painted after the 1577 fire. They celebrate historical events that never happened, but which certified the Serene Republic's equal footing with the Popes of Rome to the south and the Emperors of the Holy Roman Empire to the north. Strip them away and the room remains spectacular. It is the scale and measure, the nobility and transparency of the structure itself, the deployment of walls and floors, doors and windows, that make this building one of the most beautiful in the world, and very little else on this scale poses a challenge, with the exception of the Parthenon, the Pantheon, and the remaining structures of the antiquity. This Palace was the jewel of the Republic and the envy of the world. Nothing built since matches its evocative and innovative beauty.

But it requires work to see it. What exists today in the Doge's Palace is Venice past its peak, a moribund Venice living on its glorious past. The truly splendid Venice, Venice at the acme of its wealth and power, the seductive queen of the seas and the ruthless prince of merchants, back in the days when the walls were movies and everything told a story, is left forever to our imagination.

You can't take pictures on the inside, but the exterior tells the same story, differently, in the DOGE'S PALACE GALLERY.

Venice Marathon

2009-10-25T10:02:00.001-07:00

The Venice Marathon is 42km -- 26 miles long -- like other marathons. Like other marathons there are thousands of runners (6,000 entries). But the last few kilometers are, like the city itself, absolutely unique.

The marathon begins at the Villa Pisani in Stra and follows the Brenta canal through the Riviera del Brenta, home to the Palladian summer villas of the Venetian aristocrats of the high renaissance and baroque. The course then runs through industrial Marghera and Mestre, loops for 3K through Parco San Giuliano on the landward shore of the lagoon, then crosses the lagoon over the 4km Ponte della Liberta.

It continues around the hind end of Venice, where the cruise ships dock, and reaches the Zattere, the city's southern flank. From that point, it is a run like no other. It edges the Giudecca canal, passing that unprecedented string of Palladio churches -- Redentore, Zitelle, and San Giorgio Maggiore -- and at the Punta della Dogana crosses a temporary 170m pontoon bridge over St. Mark's Basin and continues past Piazza San Marco to the finish line, several bridges later, at the Riva Sette Martiri.

As marathons go, this one is considered "flat and fast." But in the last 3km there are 14 bridges over canals; wooden ramps are placed over the stone steps of the bridges making the run a bit of a roller coaster ride. The runners crossing the bridges echo like drums and thunder.

It is also one of the most beautiful cityscapes in the world, if not the most beautiful. Crossing the pontoon bridge across the basin the runners seemed as dazzled as they were exhausted. The crowd was generous with their rallying cries and rounds of applause for the runners. The clouds parted, perhaps s little too much for running comfort, but from a spectators point of view, the bright sun and blue sky were textbook beautiful.

See for yourself in the MARATHON GALLERY

Venice at Night

2009-10-19T15:24:00.000-07:00

I love Venice best at night.

During the day the light and color are overwhelming and, ironically, it is easy to overlook the details which make the city so uniquely beautiful. Full light smooths out the details of the stonework; it looks brighter but flatter, or dirtier and less defined. At night the shadows etch the details. The difference between full moon and no moon is almost as dramatic as the difference between sunrise and sunset.

Because of the way the city is lit at night, it is hard to take pictures faithful to the living experience. There are thousands of bright street lights at close intervals. They drive cameras insane. There is no more well-lit city at night than Venice. But it is not even lighting, it is in bursts, and the best looking is between the lamps.

But at night the city is quite deserted. Venice is, in its essence, a small town with 30,000,000 tourists a year. During the day and at dusk, when the streets teem with people, it is impossible to focus on the structures which make Venice what it is in its essence. At night, when the streets and squares are deserted, it shows best its proper scale, its improbable physical setting, and its eclectic beauty, the fusion of Byzantine style, renaissance nostalgia for the glory of ancient Rome, and the baroque esthetic of more is more.

This is my first night gallery. Up until last week, I knew what I wanted to do but couldn't do it. The solutions were quite simple: a tripd and a new camera. These images are the closest I have gotten to capturing what it is I see walking around at night.

VENICE NIGHT GALLERY

Handel Rocks Malibran

2009-10-15T13:29:00.000-07:00

Handel, Agrippina
Teatro Malibran
Venezia
14.X.09

Handel was 24, at the tail end of a three-year sojourn in Italy, when he composed Agrippina for the Carnevale festivities in Venice. It premiered at Teatro San Giovanni Grisostomo on 26 December, 1709, almost exactly three hundred years ago.

I saw it performed last night at the same theater. Inaugurated in 1678, by 1730 the theater was already in decline. While Napleon closed many things, that theater was not one of them. It was restored in the 1830s and reopened as the Teatro Malibran in honor the the mezzo-soprano Maria Malibran.

Today the theater is serviceable although I have heard musicians judge the acoustic as rather dry. I enjoy it because you can see and hear well from a larger percentage of the seats than at La Fenice.

Agrippina sounded astoundingly fresh, sly, exuberant; it is forever young. The show runs four hours -- two hours of arias, two hours of da capo -- but my interest never flagged. Although one of the indispensable elements of baroque opera was lavish stage spectacle, nobody could afford to mount such productions today. But even absent spectacle, Agrippina was engaging. The production here was Philippe Starck modern and it worked just fine.

Handel's inventiveness is nothing short of miraculous. There are 47 numbers in Agrippina, almost all of them arias for one of the eight singers, and they are stitched together with recitativo that is engaging, affecting, witty. The story is a baroque fantasia on classical themes, the approach is caustic, filled with the social criticism of a Beaumarchais applied to the Roman Imperials and here played for farce. Claudio, the emperor, was a drunken oaf, Miles Gloriosus as Imperator. Agrippina, his wife, is every bit the asp as Livia in "I, Claudius", but played for laughs and the batting of her Bette Davis eyes. Nerone is an ineffectual wimp, Poppea a scheming vamp with a scared little girl inside, and Ottone, a tall hunk of manly man whose mezzo-soprano voice is at ironic odds with his Mr. Clean build and shaved dome.

Of the eight singers last night, two were female sopranos, two were male sopranos, two were mezzo sopranos and two were basses. Of the two male sopranos, Nerone -- Florin Cezar Ouatu -- was a true soprano as opposed to the richer mezzo voice of Xavier Sabata as Ottone.

Ann Hallenberg played Agrippina like a plush Bette Davis and sang the fiercely difficult music effortlessly, richly detailed and exquisitely articulated, while convincing us that she was only trying, as any mother would, to make sure that her son Nerone landed on the throne, no matter what.

Poppea, Veronica Cangemi, looked like a young Teresa Stratas, a mistress of slink and vamp in a blond wig, spinning off little Glitter-and-be-gay type showpiece arias. Ottone's aria at the beginning of act two was a breathtaking -- literally -- demonstration of breath control over extraordinarily long and melancholy legato lines, and Nerone's manic Act III aria brought cheers from the house. Each one of the cast has several arias that stop you dead with musical skill, rhythmic incisiveness, sheer loveliness of tone, or the persuasive urgency of the melody, whether melancholy, giddy, angry, jubilant, or nasty -- Machiavellian nasty-- often the case.

As was customary, Handel canniabalized his own works and everyone else's for tunes, 47 of them, each distinct melodically and rhythmically. Huge kudos to Fabio Bondi and the musicians who realized Handel's score and met his impossible demands with rich, full-bodied music making that never lost track of nuance and mood.

But the biggest kudos of all go to George Frederich. Let's talk about standing the test of time. When a baroque opera lasts for four hours, you expect to see an exodus at each of the intervals.

Didn't happen.

The music-making was of such a consistently high level, and the music of such glittering charm, that there was no reason to leave. There was no better place to be.

Magic Numbers

2009-10-15T09:58:00.000-07:00

Andrea Palladio a/e Venezia
Museo Correr,
Venezia

Old buildings were not built the way new buildings are. For one thing, they were built with the assumption they would stand forever, or at least for a very very long time.

The oldest buildings we have were all built on complex numerical systems, systems of ratio and proportion which were determined to be the right ones to create harmonious, meaningful interior and exterior space. When we call them perfect, we mean that literally. The numbers all add up. They are the realization of ideal form, whether its the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Parthenon, the Pantheon, or San Giorgio Maggiore.

But San Giorgio Maggiore is the one I know best, so it's the building I will stick with for the sake of argument.

The model for San Giorgio Maggiore was the Temple to Augustus in Pula, Croatia which was built sometime between 2 BC and 14 AD. Under the Byzantines, it was turned into a church, and like other pagan temples turned into churches, it survived where others were cannibalized for their marble.

Vitruvius -- Marcus Vitruvius Pollio -- was born and died before the Christian Era. He was a Roman soldier and architect, a man of exceptional brilliance sometimes referred to as the world's first engineer in the modern sense of the word.

Vitruvius wrote De Architectura, the Ten Books of Architecture that Palladio studied in the mid-1500s. He studied the books and, thanks to his patron Gian Giorgio Trissino, visited many of the sites, and measured for himself, to verify that the numbers, which had been run through the Vitruvean computer, were perfect.

They were.

The key measurement for understanding the proportions of the facade of San Giorgio Maggiore is the diameter of a large column at its base. It is the key, the 1 of a system of ratios such as 1:15 for the height of the major order columns.

Palladio's original design for San Giorgio didn't simply recreate the Temple of Augustus. He reimagined it for a new site, an island at the tip of Giudecca, in a new setting, overlooking St. Mark's Basin and the mouth of the Grand Canal, in full view of the Doge's Palace and the Basilica of San Marco.

You cannot stand back too far to admire the building. The space in front of it is short. One more step and you are in the water. It was meant to be seen across the water, rising up like a majestic dream. The pronaus -- the porch -- of the building was designed to thrust toward the basin, surrounded by free-standing Corinthian columns.

How the interior works with the exterior

The rich Bendictines who had hired Palladio agreed to his design, although it was thoroughly iconoclastic for many reasons. Palladio's personal tide was high in Venice at that moment, and they agreed despite he church's historic aversion to church buildings emulating pagan temples. That they agreed was partly an expression of the historic conflicts between Venice and Rome, and also a measure of the rising tide of the Renaissance which had flowed downhill to Rome earlier and even up hill, to Venice, by Palladio's moment. Up until that time the church abhorred free-standing exterior columns; instead, they were "engaged", stuck in the walls like a decorative motif. Monospaces were also abhorred. Cubic, rectangular, and especially circular spaces were distinctly "pagan." Proper Christian basilicas required a nave-and-aisle structure in the form of either a Greek or Latin cross.

Necessity truly is the mother of invention. Palladio had already brilliantly solved the aisle-and-nave problem at San Pietro di Castello, San Francesco della Vigna, and Redentore, by superimposing Roman facades. Flattened, their columns engaged, all space absent around them, are two perfectly proportioned Roman facades, one to accommodate the full width of the aisles, and one to majestically frame the nave. At San Pietro di Castello the central sectopm is based on a Roman triumphal arch, the Arco di Savi in Verona. At San Giorgio, Palladio pushed the envelope even further.

Palladio's design for San Giorgio with the Temple of Augustus as pronaus broke all the rules. The columns were free-standing. This was not a flattened approximation of a great Roman temple; it was the full monty, in three dimensions. But it was not round, it was not a monospace; behind the majestic facade was a Latin cross basilica that corresponded in every dimension with proportions of the major order columns. Palladio made the concessions he needed to build the building he wanted.

Unfortunately, Palladio died long before the completion of San Giorgio Maggiore, and upon his death the Benectines immediately retreated and ordered the pronaus pushed back into another superimposed facade. They would go no further than Redentore, a kilometer away. The full brilliance of Palladio's building was never realized; our loss.

But inside, Palladio has the last laugh. Majestic Diocletian windows light the porticos and arches and apses, the same porticos and arches and apses as the Baths of Diocletian in Rome, the most lavish of the public baths at the height of Roman decadence.

But back to the numbers...

The ratio of the diameter of the major order columns to their height is 1:15, which is the proper proportion for a Corinthian column (the Corinthian order is the slenderest) as laid out in Palladio's Four Books of Architecture based on Vitruvius's Ten.

The space between the inner pillars flanking the portal is a bit smaller than it should be but the space between the remaining columns is the two diameters it should be.

The 1:15 ratio is for height measured from the base to the crown of the major order columns. The Corinthian capitals have corresponding proportions of their own: the entire capital is 1-1/6 diameter, while the leafy crown alone is one even.

Like other precision- engineered designs intended to last, these structures are jigsaw puzzles of chiseled stone, everything breaking down into pieces carefully fit together. Palladio was a stone mason first; he understood stone and stone construction, down to the minutest details. The notches into which a stone tooth of pediment slots into a column was based on specific numbers also in ratio.

At the Palladio show currently in the Museo Correr, there is a video which shows the order in which the stones were laid for the entire facade, from the base to the peak of the pediment. The split-screened and superimposed images of San Giorgio, San Francisco, San Pietro and Redentore show the numbers.

It is a gigantic harmony machine, the numbers going back to Pythagoras and the Music of the Spheres. It is the soul music of Western Civilization, although most of us don't hear it.

Palladio certainly did.

Venice, Autumn, Night

2009-10-13T15:56:00.000-07:00

Beyond the square
there is an arch.
Beyond the arch
there is a bridge
Beyond the bridge
there is water.
Beyond the water
there is a bridge.
Beyond the bridge
there is an arch.
Beyond the arch,
there is a square.

Beyond the the square
is the lagoon.
Beyond the lagoon
there are islands.
Beyond the islands
the Adriatic Sea
hisses, cold and silver
in the moonlight.

Venezia
14.X.09

Night thoughts

2009-10-12T11:58:00.000-07:00

Venice is different at night, drained of color, a study in shadow and light. It is a brightly lit city in general, at the street level, where there are almost no dark corners. I know this from experience.

After I had been here less than a year, I was teaching English on the mainland, in Mogliano Veneto. One night I stayed late with one of my students, drinking wine and talking about literature until almost midnight. I ran and caught the last train to Venice at 12-15. I sat down in my seat feeling pleased with myself for having made the train and then realized, half-way to Venice, my bag, with my cell phone and my keys, were locked in the classroom in Mogliano and there were no more trains that night.

At 1am they close Santa Lucia train station. It was early November, cold, but fortunately not freezing. My neighbor, who had a key to my apartment, was asleep; her lights were out.

I felt amazingly stupid, and I decided I could tough it out until 6am, when I knew my neighbor would be up, or I wouldn't feel so stupid about waking her up. I couldn't get a hotel for the night because my passport was at home; and I was paranoid about being stopped by police because I was, at that point, technically an illegal alien. Paranoia and frustration grew in equal measure.

As I walked across the Scalzi bridge, through Santa Croce and San Polo I looked for the kinds of places I might have found in the US to warm up. Venice closes early; nothing was open. All the shutters were down. The streets were deserted. I walked to the Accademia bridge, across, toward San Marco and then to Rialto and up Strada Nova back toward the train station. I did the entire circuit of the city, twice, before exhaustion set in and I had to find a place to rest. That was when I learned, indelibly, that there are no dark corners in Venice at night. There are incandescent street lamps on the narrowest lanes and in the most obscure cul-de-sacs.

Around 4am I found a walled courtyard just off the Grand Canal near Campo San Polo. The heavy iron gate was ajar; inside it was reasonably dark, the only light coming from a streetlight outside the wall. There was a marble bench under a large magnolia tree, and I lay there, trying to sleep, until 5-30, and then I knew I could find some coffee somewhere and head back to the apartment.

I didn't cover the entire city, but enough to know it intimately, at night, with nowhere to go. I never felt more alien, nor more alone; a sixty-year-old man in ridiculous situation. It had become something of a quest for me, a trial by darkness and solitude. I had the same feeling I had felt about jail forty years earlier. If I can get through this, I thought, I can get through anything. There is nothing left to frighten me.

At least -- and the only thing that got me through the long, long night without despair -- I knew that with the sunrise it would be over, that I would be able to get into my warm apartment, to sleep for a few hours before my real day began, to eat and piss in comfort and security. That was when I thought about what my friend Kate, who worked for the Canadian State Department in Rome, had said to me one fragrant spring morning in the garden of the bed and breakfast. She was stationed in Rome after years in Africa, where she had witnessed the worst poverty, carnage, and genocide, dealing routinely with torturers and the tortured. She hated Rome, and wanted to get back to Africa eventually.

"You have at least one good meal a day every day; more than one pair of shoes; and a reliable roof over your head," she said. "You're in the 1%." Her smile was simultaneously mirthful and ironic. "And if you can't get everything you own into two suitcases," she added, "you consume too much!"

Although I have always made a point of walking Venice at night because of its particular beauty, that night I had no choice. The lovely was menacing, the quaint, threatening, the obscure, frightening. But I also had ample opportunity to begin to understand the effect of moonlight on water and stone, the combined effect of all of these, and the miracle of sunrise as the sky finally lightened.

I finally bought a tripod. I have been thinking about it for a long time. Now I can experiment with capturing the experience of Venice at night. Given the limitations of my camera, and given that I am not a photographer, I do the best I can. With each batch, I learn.

I am working toward capturing Palladio's Giudecca churches, Redentore, Zitelle, and San Giorgio Maggiore. Tonight I began experimenting with Redentore. The difficulty with these Palladio structures is that the only way to get the proper distance from them is from the water, where you bobble. Bound to land, and without a panoply of lenses, you are forced to extreme longshots or extreme closeups. There is little middle ground.

You can see the preliminary attempts with Redentore and San Giorgio IN THE NIGHT GALLERY

A sense of scale

2009-10-04T10:38:00.001-07:00

A medium-sized cruise ship dwarfs Redentore

These cruise ships are the sea monsters destroying Venice. Serene on the surface, their wake roils the bottom of the canals and the lagoon; the erosive action of their wake and the vibratios of their engines, magnified under the water, is responsible for crackiing centuries-old stone, for loosening foundations, for undermining the infrastructure of the city.

They are floating cities, these boats. It was estimated that they loaded and unloaded 3,000,000 people in Venice last year. That's a lot of wear and tear on a fragile city, and accounts for 10% of the tourist load (which peaked in 2007 at 30,000,000 for the year). The city has sold itself to them. Tourism is the only game left in town. Shops and restaurants are dependent upon it; there is little local economy to speak of outside tourism.

But it is a dangerous addiction. In the main, these cruise passengers spend only a few hours on land. They walk a bit, take tours, buy cheap souvenirs, and move on to the next port of call.

There are so many shops selling cheap crap because that is what they, and the majority of the other tourists, want to buy.

"Oh, look," I heard one English woman scream to another. "These are REALLY cheap! Let's go in here!"

Venice is saturated with mask shops and glass trinket shops and tee-shirt and souvenir shops. My friend once counted 187 counterfeit purse sellers along the Riva between Arsenale and the Bridge of Sighs, the equivalent of a three block walk. There are so many cheap generic sandwiches because that is what the masses of tourists eat -- slices of mediocre pizza, sandwiches, and gelato; things you can eat on the fly, walking or sitting on the steps of a church or a bridge or the wall of a canal. The plague of plastic bottles is also monumental, but this is not restricted to Venice.

This is an expensive addiction for Venice. Often the cruise passengers stay and eat on their ships. The restaurants are hurting because so many of the tourists no longer even sit in restaurants or stop at bars for something to drink. They eat sandwiches while they walk and lug liter bottles of warm water wherever they go. How did people live without dehydrating for thousands of years prior to the fabrication of the plastic bottle?

And it is a suicidal addiction. The physics of these massive boats in the lagoon is a disaster. The erosive effects of their wake, so fortuitiously invisible to the untrained eye, can kill the goose that lays the golden egg. Unlike climate change and emissions controls, this is not a massive global-scaled problem, and, unlike them, there has a relatively simple solution: make the boats dock outside the lagoon, in the Adriatic.

There are activists fighting to stop entry of the big ships into the lagoon. Passengers could be loaded and unloaded on the Adriatic side, ferried in on smaller boats. But that would be hugely expensive and cut severely into profits. Given the addiction to money, black and white, that these ships generate, it is a daunting task to move their docks back into the sea. It would be nice if the crusaders against these Leviathans are doing more than tilting at windmills. They are right. The foundations of their world are being eroded before their very eyes.

What is unique to Venice, what is hers alone, is the network of sand bars and salt marshes, islands and canals, the encircling lagoon, and its extraordinarily dense patrimony of fabulous art and buildings. This is what is being threatened with spoliation and extinction.

Docked ship, from Zattere

Changing seasons

2009-10-03T11:09:00.001-07:00

It's all about the light. There is less of it, it's dark by 7:30 now, and it comes at different angles. But what there is, is glorious, especially under the full moon, and especially around the Punta della Dogana, where the moon soars like a white balloon over San Giorgio. The tones of the sky, and of the light on the water, put all human art to shame.

All the cameras with tripods were out; this does not happen every night. I don't have my tripod yet, but I keep trying. Here are shots around the Punta della Dogana, Saturday, October 3, 2009.

Roman Bath as Renaissance Church

2009-09-30T12:40:00.000-07:00

The baths of Imperial Rome inspired some of the greatest churches of the renaissance.

Particularly the Baths of Diocletian in Rome, completed ca. 300 AD, which covered 32 acres and could comfortably accommodate 3,000 bathers. The complex included changing rooms, gymnasiums, libraries, meeting rooms, theaters, concert halls, sculpture gardens, pools of hot, medium, and cold water with virtual steam rooms and saunas near the furnaces, all executed in marble and mosiac. Designed to dazzle with its splendor, it was a PR project. Diocletian had never been to Rome. He was a soldier-emperor. But he had heard of the beauty and the popularity of the Baths of Caracalla built almost a century earlier and his mandate was simple -- the baths bearing his name would be bigger, better, grander and more beautiful than those built by Caracalla.

Walking inside Redentore, and especially in San Giorgio Maggiore, the two greatest Palladio masterpieces of the Venetian renaissance, this provenance is triumphantly clear. All that's missing are the steaming pools and naked bathers. The arches and apses and domes that now shelter the holiest religious icons, once closed their loving arms around the public baths of the most notoriously decadent city in history. Unless you are Fellini, it's useless to try and imagine what might have transpired in all those giant marble tubs.

Re-imagined by Palladio these spaces are sober, majestic, monochrome, and subject to the constant interplay of light through the well-placed windows that take their name, Diocletian Windows, or Thermal Windows (from terme for bath) from the Baths of Diocletian.

Palladio's windows are clear bottleglass, the sun through them is as white as poured steel. Raise your eyes above the religious statues and paintings -- from the top of the first order upwards -- and you are in a pagan space with its joyous interplay of circles and arcs and straights, and absent the tubs and the gambling and the whores, it is equally suited to the religious purposes to which it has been put: it is grand and elevating.

Proust was wrong

2009-09-28T14:07:00.000-07:00

Proust was wrong, or at least as I recall it. There is a quote in my memory where Proust says that Santa Maria della Salute is a perfect example of a mediocre building made great by its location.

There is, of course, no escaping the location.

The church stands on over a million and a quarter trees pounded into the mud between the Grand Canal and the Zattere to support its mountain of stone. It faces the Grand Canal where it widens into St. Mark's Basin. Salute is triangulated by San Marco and San Giorgio, and on the Festa della Salute a temporary pontoon bridge is built across the Grand Canal to reach Salute from the San Marco side. During the Republic the Doge led a procession from the Basilica of San Marco to Salute, across the bridge, in perpetuity, in gratitude for the Virgin sparing the city from the terrible plague of 1630.

The architect was a relatively unknown 26-year-old, Baldessare Longhena. The design is actually one of the great examples of human ingenuity and problem-solving, but you have to understand the problem to appreciate the achievement. Proust was certainly aware of the problem, but his dismissal is that of the esthete, void of the customary rigor and precision of his analyses. It reeks of an ill-considered first impression. Perhaps he didn't spend enough time with it.

To grasp its true genius, you have to walk around the exterior slowly and observe it from its successive angles, preferably at night when it is well-lit but the city is quiet and there are few distractions. The inside must be seen at several different times during the day for reasons that will be made clear.

Since the fall of Rome, architecture has labored in its shadow. The Renaissance revived the rules and proportions, the structure and decorative motifs of an idealised Rome extrapolated from its ruins. Palladio's Churches of San Giorgio Maggiore and Redentore, behind it, are the last word in Renaissance Roman.

But the Church had a problem with this idealization of Roman architecture. In its early centuries it inhabited ancient temples, and then it built its own upon, and often incorporating, their ruins. Eventually the forms themselves, the monospaces and circular temples, were abhorred by the Church as too pagan. The nave-and-aisle basilica ruled; it was too humble to have been used in the great Roman temples. What was not incorporated into the Christian iconography and style was suppressed.

Up until Longhena's design for Salute, circular basilicas were forbidden. The echoes of the Pantheon in Rome were too loud and too clear, and although the Pantheon had been converted into a Catholic Church, the Vatican frowned on any use of the circular form in highly visible or important locations.

Even the Benedictines across St. Mark's Basin, when confronted with the task of completing San Giorgio Maggiore after Palladio's death, chickened out. Palladio's design featured a perfect Roman facade complete with a porch thrust forward. Once Palladio died, before the church was completed, they revisited the design and pushed the porch in, making the facade another variation of the superimposed pediments Palladio had used for Redentore.

Longhena's idea is brilliant. The church is not round, it is not a Pantheon per se. It is an octagon. The octagonal base supports a round dome and inside the space is round. He created a round basilica within an octagonal frame. And he got away with it. That was not only due to the cleverness of his design, but in some measure to a loosening of the stylistic reins during the general restyling of the Catholic Church in the Counter-Reformation.

In a brilliantly Venetian masterstroke, the dome sits on a glass drum. The light floods Salute through these high, tall, clear glass windows from different directions at different times of day. It should be seen at as many different times of day as possible. The interior can be uncannily luminous. As always in Venice it is about the light.

As you enter and walk around, you are definitely in a different realm, no longer Roman, no longer Renaissance; it is pure imaginative fantasy. It is Baroque. The circular floor beneath the dome is a geometric Persian carpet of inlaid polychrome marble. The altar chapel, on the far side of the soaring circles created by the dome, is a smaller variation on the same theme, windows supporting the ceiling and the smaller dome above the altar. It is complex, spacious, luminous. Light rules.

The stonework and stucco are white and grey, a harmonious monotone that highlights the paintings and creates, with the surrounding sculptures on pillars, walls, and ceilings, its own textures of light and shadow.

In its echoing center, all we see of the Grand Canal is a distant glitter of the sun upon the water through the open portals. It is not about the setting. It is about the sensuous curves and the stately geometry of the interior.

Piero il magnifico

2009-09-27T08:22:00.000-07:00

Usually the Palazzo Cini Gallery is closed. Having walked by it a million times, not certain what exactly was inside, it became a perpetual enigma in my daily life. Today, and for the next few weekends, it is open.

The collection is small, amassed by the Cini family and donated along with the palace to the Cini Foundation which also runs the monumental S. Giorgio Maggiore complex including the magnificent Palladio refectory and a spectacular library. (The filing system of the library is old style. Books by and about Dante are shelved under the carved bust of Dante atop it. Ditto Homer, ditto Plato, ditto Petrarch, etc. A neat system, but to find what you're looking for you need to know what the author looked like. Early cult of personality?)

The collection includes masterpieces of renaissance Tuscan and Ferrarese painting, works by such big name artists as Filippo Lippi, Pontormo, Botticelli (and Co.). These are interesting, as are many of the other paintings and drawings in their collection. The Botticelli, a "Judgment of Paris" is clearly primarily by "& Co." The Lippi is small, sad, touching, but not blisteringly beautiful like his works at the Uffizi.

No, pride of place goes to the late Piero della Francesca "Madonna con bambino" which is breathtakingly spectacular. Piero is one of my favorites and his extant work is sparse. This painting wins the Blue Ribbon for the month.

The Piero is strikingly modern; in it you can see Picasso, Modigliani, Cezanne. Like late paintings tend to be, it is spare, terse, and perfectly composed. Often this simplicity was the result of failing eyesight, as with Tiziano. But here, exquisitely articulated detail is a testament to no diminution in technical skills. The apparent simplicity is by design. If anything, Piero is here transcendent; the terse pictorial language is the result of age, skill, and fully mature artistry. The madonna's simple black robe is thrown back over her shoulder reveraling a sumptuous lining of burgundy and gold brocade Byzantine in its complexity. Its dramatic impact is emphasized by a simple sky blue shift beneath it, and beneath that, for perfection of design, a ruby colored frock with silvery gold brocade.

Everything else is clean, spartan, geometric, void; the sky behind them is a late Georgia O'Keefe desert sky. The faces are somber; their pose is monumental, as if the wind had carved them from sand and pale stone.

Piero della Francesca
Borgo San Sepolcro, 1410/20 - 1492
"Madonna con bambino"
Palazzo Cini Gallery

Is it real or did you make it up?

2009-09-24T11:07:00.000-07:00

Accademia Bridge, Santa Maria della Salute, 8AM

There are twenty-six stairs up, and down, fifty-two total, to cross the stone bridge at the Arsenale. There are 52 up and 52 down on the Accademia Bridge, total 104. This does not particularly matter to me, but it matters to a character I am writing. I could have pulled a number out of my ass, but someone would know. So I took the No. 1 to Arsenale and counted.

Fiction is a variable balance between reality and imagination. Different writers rely more heavily on one or the other.

Here's how I formulated it for myself the other night. Use reality where necessary and imagination where necessary, depending on which makes a better story. Never be limited by the truth; never yield gratuitously to the imagination.

Proust, who was rich enough to publish his own masterwork and mad enough to understand the enormity of his achievement, laid bare the contradiction between the two and worked its dialectic from every angle. The result is genius; the product of a singular set of circumstances, something never to be repeated. But he set the bar very high, and most memoirs contain nowhere near the volume of truth as Proust's fiction.

So it is a pleasure to blend, like an alchemist, what seems to be memory, with what seems to be imagination (both being very approximate and difficult to quantify), and create something unique from them, transforming the base metals into gold.

Quantum physics proved how the act of observing something changes it. The act of remembering also changes reality, as the does the act of imagining. In the end, the real is more or less a composite of an infinite number of simultaneous points of view, vide "Rashomon." Nothing is ever real except the present moment, and there is very real reason to question whether anything else exists.

Strange as it may seem, that makes perfect sense to me...

The images are merely an excuse for thinking aloud... Santa Maria della Salute at 8am, when the sun is rising over the lagoon, and at 8 pm, when the sun is setting over the mainland.

Santa Maria della Salute from Accademia Bridge, 8pm

The Waste Land

2009-09-16T11:12:00.001-07:00

Western sky after storm

For unaccountable reasons, I reread T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land".

Written in 1922, it was, when I was in college, regarded as the definition of Modern. Yeats was mystical-traditional, Dylan Thomas plain drunk and Ezra Pound plain crazy. But Pound's influence, his encyclopedic knowledge and precise language, is evident in every line of The Waste Land, which Pound edited.

I read it in the aftermath of the first big storm of the season, a rip-roaring downpour that emptied the streets and filled the vaporettos to capacity and beyond. My ride from San Zaccaria to Zattere, normally a pleasant eight-minute zip across the basin and up the Giudecca Canal, was a complete nightmare. There was barely space to breath. I was standing in an exposed area, partly covered by other people's umbrellas; the poor English chap in front of me, in his shirtsleeves, pushed against the gate, was streaming water and somehow smiling good-naturedly. His wife tried to hold her umbrella over him above the shoulders of other people but one slight turn of the boat and the wind flipped it inside out.

A tumultuously wet and thundrous day. A good day to read The Waste Land which ends with a rain storm of expiation and rebirth.

The Waste Land not only held up, it was, in fact better; that is to say, I appreciated it in a new and wholly personal way.

When I was 19 I was struck by the stark and unique beauty of particular phrases, but lost in the maze of mythology and footnotes about arcane references. I didn't worry about the footnotes today. I just read the poem, got into its flow, into its sequence of situations, dissolving, like film dissolves, one into another, or jump cutting away. The language of the cinema was only just being developed, but Eliot and/or Pound understood the concepts of montage and the principles of film editing. The poem is "cinematic" the way Puccini wrote movie music before there was any and movie music as we know it would have been far different had there been no Puccini. Similarly, Eliot was modern before there was Modern, when all he had to go on was The First World War with its astonighingly bloody trench warfare. Airplanes and bombs made it bloodier than Austerlitz or Waterloo; but nothing, for sheer barbarism, compared to what was to come. Eliot's vision reverberates with the rest of the Twentieth Century; its style is the style of the Twentieth Century par excellence; it was in 1922 and remains so today. In that sense, it is a timeless masterpiece.

And that says nothing about its sensibility. It is the outcry of the parched soul, the spirit and the intellect, for salvation, and that is why it ends in that thundrous rain of grace, undeserved perhaps, but that's what grace is all about.

"And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust."

This could have been written in sands of the Almagordo Bombing and Gunnery Range, Los Alamos, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, the year that I was born. It could be about the apocalytic power of the universe released when atoms collide at high speeds. When the twin shadows of the blast merge, and the fire consumes the sky and time.

There's fear and repentence, anger and forgiveness, love and betrayal and expiation. It is as vast a saga as The Ring of the Niebelungen; but ruthlessly cut to a few surgically precise lines, the parts that stand for the whole because the whole is beyond comprehension and we only get clues. Ever.

And then there's this:

"At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched by the sun's last rays,
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—
I too awaited the expected guest.

Biennale: Lithuanian Pavillion, East-West Divan

2009-09-13T14:36:00.000-07:00

I went to the Scuola Grande della Misericordia to see the Lithuanian Biennale Pavillion and, upstairs from it, the East-West Divan show with four artists from Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Aside from the art, I have always been curious about the Misericordia. Since I have lived here it has been derelict; a hulking brick structure with no ostensible purpose. The Palasport sign over the side door is a remnant of its brief incarnation as a gymnasium, and the upper floor was home to the local basketball team. The plain brick exterior gives you no clue about what is inside.

The building is attributed to Jacopo Sansovino, who was the the favored architect of the Venetian Republic in the sixteenth century. Outside the brick is spare and unwelcoming; inside, the scale is luminous and transparent. Crossing the brick portal, you step into the high renaissance. The Renaissance ideal was to breathe life into ancient Rome, from the lifelike frescoes to the monumental architecture. The enormous double-high space is a recreation of the Grandeur that was Rome. The idealization of the past is romantic in its essence; but the buildings are, in fact, perfect. One pass through the Pantheon settles that question forever. Only the heavy weight of the church, aggressive in policing against the pagan spirit of Rome, prevented the renaissance architects from recreating the Roman temples for their churches.

The art inside was interesting in several different directions. The primary Lithuanian installation was "Tube" by Zilvinas Kempinas, built amid the triple colonnades of the first floor. The tube, big enough to walk through and as long as the space, is comprised of horizontal stripes of thin metal alternating with transparent spaces. To walk through is to enter an Op Art world. The effect is mesmerizing.

But I found the art upstairs even more fascinating. The show is called "East-West Divan: Contemporary Art from Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan." Their literature describes the exibition as follows:

The exhibition will present recent works by ten artists from three countries, better known in the West for stereotypes of terrorism and Islamic extremism than for their rich artistic heritage and vibrant contemporary cultures.

East-West Divan meditates upon links between the artistic traditions in Venice and the Persian artistic heritage shared by these countries, revealing the tightly knotted relationship between East and West - both in life and the imagination.

The artists vary in style, but all share the integration of traditional techniques with today's content. If you look at some of these, and their accompanying statements, in the GALLERY, you will get a sense of the mission of these artists, to express the identity of real people who are more than stereotypes, who are not driven by a lust for world domination, and who simply want to live their lives in their way in peace.

It is a beautiful and startling revelation. The art is gorgeous, never provocative simply for the sake of being provocative, but always thoughtful and therefore persuasive. Culturally diverse people dream the same dreams.

Art can do that. At its best, that's what it does. It is an expression of our common humanity.

MISERICORDIA GALLERY

Lightning Strikes Twice

2009-09-13T13:12:00.000-07:00

Grigolo and Ciofi, final curtain calls

On my way home this afternoon I passed by La Fenice. I knew the cast of today's Traviata was the same cast I had seen. The matinee was due to start in less than half an hour and I figured I would see if I could get a ticket.

My seat was in the same box I sat in the first time I went to La Fenice in 1990. It is a lateral box above the orchestra and on the first level, the same level as the stage. When the singers are on your side of the stage, you could reach over and touch them. That was precisely how I wanted to see Patrizia Ciofi and Vittorio Grigolo.

Was it as good as Wednesday night? In many ways, it was better. But I think that is because it was more immediate. My seat Wednesday was better both for sightlines and sound, but achieved these by distance. Up very close I could see the shadings of their expressions, what they did with their eyes with their hands.

Ciofi is at her peak; she is capable of taking your breath away. Grigolo is in the midst of a brilliant beginning and where it will lead is anyone's guess. But for now, they set the stage on fire. When she desperately runs her hands through his thick black hair, it is his thick black hair. No wigs. And her signature red hair is part of her character. They are two stunning people desperately in love and fate has decreed that they will not live happily ever after.

Part of these artists' intensity has to do with the fierce difficulty of the music and the level of concentration required to produce it well. But the rest, the hyperdrive they hit, is dramatic inspiration, the director's and theirs. They put the music at the service of the drama and they do it with the power to make us believe it.

The production a perfect visual and theatrical setting for the drama. Everything about it, to the smallest detail, is of a piece and makes sense within itself. Thank Robert Carsen for that. It is 180 degrees from the ugly and inane production of Romeo e Juliette Fenice did earlier this year, the vapidity of the production matched by the mediocrity of the voices. In Traviata, nothing is gratuitous; even the Viva Las Vegas gypsy scene works. What great production of Traviata doesn't veer into kitsch during this interlude?

During the overture Violetta lolls on her velvet bed as men in business suits, one after another, shower her with money. At the end of "Sempre Libera" she is flinging the money around madly. In the second act the leaves that cover the stage of the lovers' country retreat, the leaves they lay in and shuffle through, and that occasionally falls from the trees and from wallets in almost every scene, are dollar bills. In every scene, including the confrontation with Giorgio Germont, a man throws money at her. Everyone misses the point. She has to die before they understand what really made her tick. Sometimes things cannot be put right, the center cannot hold, things do fall apart.

Ciofi and Grigolo took no prisoners. Vladimir Stoyanov, as Germont Pere, did not fare as brilliantly only because in the world of this Traviata he is a grey-suited corporation man, a Senior VP of Finance caught in a tawdry family melodrama. His affect and mannerisms were constricted and constrained. His passion crept in slowly and all the more dramatically for it. It worked for me, and it made his denunciation of Alfredo and his heartbreak at the end all the more touching.

Because I was sitting over the orchestra, I could also watch maestro Myung-Whun Chung. He stood before the orchestra, monkish and still and immensely powerful. He alone put the key in the ignition. Before he did, he waited for complete quiet in the theater. At the beginning of the third act, he waited and waited and waited until the theatre finally became quiet and was just about to raise his baton when when somebody sneezed. I think one the woodwinds cracked up first. The orchestra was heroically stoic as others in the audience giggled, and Maestro Chung, his back to the audience, finally had to laugh.

It was a brilliant afternoon at the opera, but more than anything, it was absolutely exhilarating to hear what I thought was a vanished species, the golden-throated Italian tenor. Grigolo has got it; I hope he does the right thing with it.

Fenice | La Traviata

2009-09-09T14:57:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while, if you go to enough opera, the characters onstage come to life, the singers become real people caught in terrible twists of fate.

Violetta's plight is certainly one of the most wrenching in all opera. Like other great operatic heroines she is torn between love and duty (one of Verdi's favorite dilemmas). She accepts duty, self-sacrifice, for the sake of a young girl she has never met and will never meet. She knows she will die as a result of this decision, and she doesn't know when. When she does die, her bereft Alfredo, twice robbed of her, and his complicit father, are overwhelmed with their own private griefs.

But when I cried it was not because the music was sad. I cried at moments that were incredibly beautiful. The Brindisi certainly is not sad, nor "Un di felice." Ardent, impassioned, ecstatic even; not sad. "Sempre libera," mad but not sad. No, I cried at the exquisite beauty of the moment, the big picture, created when everyone was firing on all cylinders. Myung-Whun Chung wielded the baton and shaped a sensitive reading; he is like Jeffrey Tate in his ear for the vocal/orchestral balance. He serves the singers well, and they him. The team has performed it before and will perform it again.

Vittorio Grigolo is the Platonic Ideal of Alfredo. He is beautiful the way the young Elvis was beautiful onstage. His joy and anguish are believable and he looks great in form-fitting levis, a tight black shirt and a black leather jacket. He was coltish, athletic, smitten and ardent, whether smiling or smouldering. And, oh yes, he sang beautifully. It was the rare instance of the music written for such man being sung by one. His voice was shiny and supple, rang out over the orchestra as needed, and was as delicate and soft as needed to be convincing in the intimate moments. The voice seduced this ear. From the brindisi, when he plays a white grand piano, he had my attention. That most magical of stage illusions happens: he becomes Alfredo. You could see his adoration for Violetta in the movements of his body and hear his emotional changes in his voice. The heat between the lovers is palpable. You never ask "why" because you understand perfectly well.

Patrizia Ciofi creates a stunning Violetta with pale white skin and long red hair, her lean body alternately tense and voluptuous. She has internalized this production; it is hard to tell where she ends and it begins. She is compelling, heart-breaking, and exquisitely musical. She also plays well with others, which makes her an ideal partner in duets. Her transformation during the confrontation with Giorgio Germont, from no to yes, from life to death, was visceral and noble. Her public humiliation at Flora's party was shattering. The stage picture for the prelude to Act 3, Violetta alone on the floor, her face illuminated only by the glow of the empty television screen on the floor beside her, was chilling. "Addio del passato" was the bitter and sad farewell of a dying woman.

This beautiful partnership began in 2005 when this production was new, and, under the baton of Loren Maazel, it reopened Fenice after the fire and rebuild. It has aged well; Robert Carsen is like that. The Modern Indefinite sets and costumes create a parallel universe I could easily step into and believe. Carsen's visions are poetic; they ripen nicely. The chemistry was there for magic, and it happened again and again.

I love live opera for times like these, when the fourth wall dissolves and you are in another world where only music is spoken and it is talking directly to your heart and soul.

Autumn flowerboxes

2009-09-09T07:25:00.000-07:00

Most of the summer flowers in my flower box were spent, so this morning I bought some new ones for fall. They give me immense pleasure and I try to plant them so that they look as good from the inside as from outside because I see them more from the inside. I went with Erica and Cyclamen because they seem to grow through the winter.

On my way to the flower shop I stopped into Frari (Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari), one of the twin Gothics of Venice. I hadn't been into Frari in almost year a year.

It never ceases to amaze. The interior skeleton of bare bricks is encrusted with ornate marble tombs accreted over the centuries like baroque pearls. Above, the vaults are bare; there is virtually no fresco work in the nave, some in the vaults of the transept and altar, but in the style of Byzantine mosaics rather than in Italian medieval fresco style. These frescoes are like frayed embroidered quilts. The alternating diamonds of carmel and ivory-colored marble are found on the floor of most of the large churches in Venice.

The Canova tomb, which he designed for Titziano but was buried in himself, is romantically mysterious, its door half open like all the little mausoleums -- the little houses of the dead -- that fill the cemteries on Lido. Why ajar? Are they coming or going?

Several of the other altars were designed by baroque architect Baldassare Longhena, who designed Santa Maria della Salute at the age of 26. The are huge in scale, incredibly ornate in decoration; already, the baroque has begun to veer into the grotesque. It is easy to get lost in the detail, but it is the sheer volume of light and space so strikingly framed that is the most amazing thing about Frari.

That and the Bellini triptich in the sacristy. I fell in love with that painting my first time in Venice, in 1990, and still consider it at the top of a very short list of the most beautiful paintings in the world. Looking at it, you see the Renaissance in perfect flower, so lifelike as to breathe. It is serene and touching in its humanity; the palette is vivid and jewel-toned palette; the architecture of the little chapel surrounding it and the gold frame holding it are reflected in the painting. It could only be properly seen here, where it was intended to be.

In the famous Tiziano Assumption above the altar high renaissance drama supersedes the quiet, classic interior world of Bellini. Nearby, there were white roses on the white marble gravestone of Claudio Monteverdi in the floor of a gated chapel.

There are few places quite so rich in exuberant artistic invention.

Tonight, La Traviata at La Fenice with Patrizia Ciofi as Violetta and Vittorio Grigolo as Alfredo. I hope it's as good as I hope it will be.

A day in the life

2009-09-07T12:46:00.000-07:00

I had to go to the Post Office to pay Erika's electric bill (she is in the U.S. simultaneously preparing Tosca for Nashville and Lady Macbeth for the Vienna State Opera). The landlady gave me Erika's bill a week after its due date, so I reckoned I'd better pay it right away.

Unfortunately, today was a big day for pensioners cashing their vouchers, which is one of the Post Office's most important functions here. The line was at least an hour long at the small Post Office on Campo San Polo, so I went to the main Post Office (at the foot of the Rialto Bridge, in the former German Trade Association of the middle ages. At one time this particular Grand Canal palazzo wore exterior frescoes by Tiziano and Giorgione, but they didn't last long. Human incompetence completed the job begun by the corrosive salt air).

The main post office has five service windows for pensions, bill-paying and the like, and one reserved for postal products. Of the five non-postal windows, only one was working. The computers were down. With only one window open, the line was a good hour's wait, two-thirds of them pensioners, but I seriously wanted to get the bill paid and decided to tough it out.

If the stamp window isn't busy with stamps, they can handle bill-paying, so the first argument broke out after someone at the end of the line slipped up to the empty stamp window, in front of thirty people who had been there longer. Italians are very forthcoming with their opinions; everybody has one and all are voiced. I wasn't in a particular rush, the plumber wasn't due until after three, so I settled in, but everyone else raised enough hell that a window was opened for pension business only, leaving the other window for bill paying, as well as the stamp window which quickly became a bill-paying window. This trimmed over half the wait time; I was only in line for half an hour to pay the bill which took about a minute-and-a-half.

The plumber was coming because my neighbor, whose (immense) apartment takes up the complete ground floor and two-thirds of the first floor of my building (my small apartment, once a part of it, taking up the other third), had not only not paid his rent for a year, but had also neglected to pay his water bill. I came home one day last week to find no water, and it took the landlady several phone calls to find out why it had been shut off, to pay it, and to get them to turn it back on again. That happened surprisingly quickly.

But after the shut-off and shut-on the filter on my water heater started to drip. The workman who cut the seal he had put on the day before when he shut it off, told me that after turning it back on I would need to clean the filters on the faucets; the off/on processing barrages the taps with calcium and rust. He twisted mine off to show me, and they were filthy. Something similar must have happened to the water heater filter. The leak was is a casual drip drip; I have to empty the bucket every six or seven hours. The landlady called the plumber who said he would come today after three, but never showed. At five I texted my landlady replied with his phone number. When I called him he apologized, said he'd had a crazy day and would come tomorrow at 1pm.

That left me the remains of a cool, sunny September day and I decided I deserved a gorgeous walk. I did the walk around Punta della Dogana, but in a slightly different way, noticing different things.

A party was being set up on the private deck behind the Punta della Dogana, facing San Giorgio and the immense yachts moored in the basin, all likely related to the film festival. I caught a glimpse of the festival the other night when Eve and I walked by the red carpet area on Lido, spread north of the Casino, and ended up on the terrace of the Hotel Excelsior, film festival central. It was fabulous in its way, but mostly for the conversation, for the light of the full moon on the Adriatic, and all the glamorous people around us. The hamburger wasn't bad either (much better than last time) and the buffalo mozzarella was everything you could ask for.

THIS WAY TO GALLERY

Sic transit gloria mundi

2009-09-06T15:26:00.000-07:00

I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs;
A palace and a prison on each hand:
I saw from out the wave her structures rise
As from the stroke of the enchanter's wand:
A thousand years their cloudy wings expand
Around me, and a dying Glory smiles
O'er the far times, when many a subject land
Look'd to the winged Lion's marble piles,
Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles!

Lord Byron
Childe Harold, Canto IV

Where Am I?

2009-09-03T13:09:00.000-07:00

Full moon over Dorsoduro
3.IX.09
Venezia

Three Guys on a Fence

2009-09-01T10:10:00.000-07:00

San Vio, Venezia, Biennale 2009

Where Am I?

2009-08-31T11:52:00.001-07:00

Chihuly Glass Garden
Padiglione di Venezia
Biennale, 2009
Venezia

Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!

2009-08-26T08:03:00.000-07:00

There is a vacuum
in the center
where great men
once stood.
They cannot be replaced,
though others,
maybe greater,
may arise and
eclipse them.
Perhaps not.
The small man
makes the world
seem heavy and
dangerous, proceeding
from fear and sanctifying
ignorance.
The great man
makes the ship of state
seem small and yar,
stalwart and invincible,
and the sea, so vast,
navigable.

Larry Mellman
26.VIII.2009
Venezia

2009-08-24T13:24:00.000-07:00

VENICE, 1906. WHEN OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS, A 14-YEAR-OLD LACEMAKER'S LIFE IS CHANGED FOREVER.

Fortuna dancing

2009-08-22T13:20:00.001-07:00

Fortuna dances
atop the Dogana
plump and sassy
with her sea-spray plume;
she holds her
wing-like sail
to the wind
which spins her
round
from east to west
from north to south
from up to down
and all points
in between,
and when the air
is still
she stands poised
and expectant
waiting for everything
to change
once again.

21.VIII.09
Venezia

Ferragosto

2009-08-15T14:10:00.001-07:00

According to the Italian tourist industry:

"August 15 is Ferragosto in Italy, the day when Roman Catholics believe the Virgin Mary ascended to heaven, and a major Italian holiday. Even before the time of Christ, however, Romans honored the gods on August 15 with a celebration they called Feriae Augusti [because it was created by the Emperor Augustus, so clever at providing bread and circuses]. So while the Catholic church might have co-opted the day for their own religion, they kept something of the ancient tradition in the modern name."

I have three things to say:

1. All Christian holidays were superimposed on existing "pagan" holidays, just as the pagan Roman holidays coincided with the ancient Jewish and Pre-Islamic eastern holy days. They are rooted deep in the brain stem along with a lot of other information our conscious minds find it difficult to decode. It was clever to superimpose Mary's assumption on pre-Christian harvest rituals and celebrations, rooted in fertility festivals, in the dog days of summer, when the bountiful crops are winding down.

2. According to the tourist guides, Italy shuts down for Ferragosto. Most people take their vacations in August anyway, and on the weekends surrounding Ferragosto everyone goes to the seashore, or to the lake, or to Venice. Venice never really shuts down; it has one game only, tourism, and plays it when the rest of Italy shuts down because the rest of Italy, like the rest of the world, comes to Venice to escape reality.

3. Today, the streets were uncannily deserted, or as close to it as they get here. Restaurants were open but not particularly crowded. A herd of cruise ships was parked at Tronchetto, but there were not many long lines of tourists with headphones following somebody holding up an umbrella or a penant to give them something to follow. The vaporettos weren't particularly crowded. Nothing was.

I know this because I took my new favorite short walk, along the Zattere and around the Punta della Dogana. The sky was clear, the sun extraordinarily bright, so I celebrated the assumption of Mary into the Cosmic Womb of Creation by documenting this most beautiful of walks.

You are welcome to come along.

An Open Letter to John Pull

2009-08-08T13:16:00.000-07:00

Dear John,

I have a confession to make. I was less than candid. When I sent you off to see Peter Greenaway's Le Nozze di Cana I was operating on hearsay; I hadn't seen it yet. When you live here you have a slightly different attitude toward these things. I had already studied the brilliant recreation of the painting, and I had, I thought, plenty of time.

When you were blown away by it I of course knew I had to see it sooner rather than later and when I looked at your brochure I realized it would be closed most of August and open only a couple weeks in September, so I decided to get my ass over there; which I did today, after you left.

So here's what I have to say about it. You listened to what I had to say on just about everything else, so bear with me just a little bit longer.

It was a great pleasure to have you in Venice again. I hope you enjoyed sharing La Biennale with me as much as I enjoyed sharing it with you.

Le Nozzi di Cana / The Wedding Feast at Cana

The view from San Giorgio, across St. Mark's Basin is the Pomp and Circumstance splendor of San Marco: the Zecca and the Biblioteca, the Campanile, the Clock Tower, the Basilica and Doge's Palace, the Piazzetta and the Molo all in the proper distance across the water to appreciate their scale and mad splendor.

Up close Palladio's Church of San Giorgio is too big to see. It looks better in full frontal from the Punta della Dogana, which is the perfect spot from which to appreciate the mass and volume of its superimposed facades. The adjacent Benedictine monastery is apricot, reminiscent of the Spanish baroque palazzi of Naples, stone cartouches on pastel stucco.

The show is in the Refectory Palladio created for the monastery. You enter through twin cloisters. The first is pink, perfect high renaissance. The rear cloister, pale lemon with deep green cypress trees, shows its Byzantine and Gothic origins clearly. You can stand in the center, between them, and see both through elaborate stone arches. The symmetry and simplicity is peaceful and in no way prepares you for the vestibule into the Refectory.

The vestibule is Roman in its grandeur and in its scale and in it you can see the origins of the style which was appropriated by, and became associated with, Napoleon, conflated with the impact of his Egyptian campaign. On either side of the central stairway leading into the refectory is a dry fountain of highly polished marble the color of blown roses; each basin resembles a sarcrophagus set in a niche of awesome proportions, its lion spouts ready to pour into the dry pool below. The doors are impossibly high and ascending the stairs you feel like a Roman senator stepping into an idealized antechamber.

This is where the monks ate. The room is rectangular, its proportions Palladian proportions, Vitruvean proportions. These relationships change our appreciation of the space around us and our place in it. It is like walking into Valhalla. You feel like a god.

Veronese's Le Nozze di Cana, on the far wall, is the size of a classic movie screen. As I wrote about before, this Nozze di Cana is a hightech recreation of the original which cut out and taken to Paris by Napoleon, and which the Louvre would not return to Venice when the refectory was restored. The magic of digital technology recreates it and raises the question of what it means to be a reproduction to profound new heights.

Because the space was designed by Palladio to embody Renaissance ideals, it is monumental and symmetrical, with four perfectly shaped, majestically simple windows on each side as suited to the humble monks as St. Peter's is suited to the poor carpenter's son from Bethlehem.

Renaissance chant begins the show: a capella voices on an organ ground. I don't know what it was but it sounded like Gabrielli to me. In addition to the light show that brings the painting to life in ways we never dreamed possible, projections are repeated in the smooth spaces between the windows, details blown up large, with subtitles of the spoken dialog in both English and Italian.

This work is sui generis. Looked at simply as the anatomy of a great Renaissance masterpiece it is revelatory. But it is so much more. It is a fantasia on a theme by Veronese, and opens up the world of the painting for us to inhabit and experience. Faces are pin-pointed, the painting is flipped and revealed in three dimensions, the light changes from velvety night to radiant day, from clear sunlight to driving rain. The Tinkerbelle light that leads our eye through the crowd of characters leaves a trail like a firefly on a hot summer night.

The drama of the moment when Jesus transforms water into wine is refracted through multiple prisms. There are 125 individuals in the painting, and every one has a face and a story; we hear what they are thinking and saying about the astonishing moment they are experiencing. The banquet is treated as a Venetian banquet of Veronese's time. Typical of the genius and wit are the comments by the rich and elegantly robed oenophiles: -- "the color is good. Is it safe? It has almost a smart sparkle..."

The water having been transformed to wine, and everyone having registered their opinion upon the circumstances, the vision silences their voices in a brilliant lightning and thunder storm accompanied by a crescendo of Gabrielli splendor.

As brilliant in conception as in execution, it is about as good an intellectual and artistic orgasm as there is to be found these days.

Le Nozzi di Cana was preceded by a groundbreaking project using Rembrandt's Nighwatch and another with Leonardo's Last Supper. Other shows planned include Valasquez's Las Meninas, Picasso's Guernica, Jackson Pollock's Echo: Number 25, Monet's Waterlilies, Seurat's La Grand Jatte, and will culminate with Michelangelo's Last Judgment.

It's a lot to look forward to.

And the winner is...

2009-07-31T14:02:00.001-07:00

My old friend Johnny, a brilliant autodidact, had an interesting theory about Renaissance art which we discussed over way too many drinks in the bars at the Danieli and the Gritti, at Caffe Florian, and assorted enotecas around Venice one long-ago weekend in 1993.

The theory went roughly like this. The greatness of the artist could be indexed to the beauty of the babies in the Madonna's arms. There are more beautiful Madonnas than truly beautiful babies; the baby was the acid test. Without fail, the greatest artists, Rafaello, Lippi, Bellini, painted the most beautiful babies. In other paintings there were admirable qualities, but the babies were unappealing, unconvincing, and certainly not truly beautiful. They were truly beautiful only when painted by the few, the best.

The other day I stopped by the Mestrovich Collection, scarecely more than a score paintings, each one outstanding, in the "Browning Mezzaine" of Ca' Rezzonico, the Museum of the 18th Century. It was here that I happened upon the "Sacra Conversazione" of Bonifacio De' Pitati (Verona, 1487 - Venezia, 1553).

I would never argue that De' Pitati is the greatest of artists, although he exists in rarified company. But he painted what is arguably one of the most beautiful babies anywhere.

John Wesley Retrospective

2009-07-31T13:43:00.000-07:00

John Wesley Retrospective
San Giorgio Maggiore
presented by Prada Foundation

In 2009 the earliest works, from the early 60s, look visionary. Seen in retrospect it is an uncanny mirror into a future that has already passed.

He is a symbolist in the true sense. He uses symbols iconographicallyl-- a post office badge (for years his "day job" was at the Post Office), a profile line of large-breasted women, Whoopee! girls who look like their ubiquitous echoes seen on the mudflaps of tricked out trucks and muscle cars. The part speaks for the unseen whole. The images are nostalgia-filled and makes one better understand the beginnings of the sensibility that made Warhol a very rich man.

The cow framed by a repeated pattern of naked dancing ladies (1964) predates the Warhol cow wallpaper by two years. By 1969 the Mod Gernreich vision is explicit. He works in a consistent style that is witty and elegant, with a restrained palette always colored within the lines. Although they lack the bite of the best contemporary work they are beautiful in the Japanese manner ("Tour de France," "Egg"), as flat formal compositions. "Good Appetite" and "Gluttony" are sly. In "Plague," a naked woman in the Drop Drill position is rained upon by a deluge of bouncing diapered babies.

I prefer the lurid hot house of medieval frescoes and the complexly imagined dreams and nightmares at the Punta della Dogana. But each of Wesley's works are painted with a masterful stroke that is entirely controlled, not filled with drama.

An electric charge enters the show with the late erotica, Blondie giving Dagwood a blow job in bed or Dagwood's wet dream of a libidinously drunk geisha ("Utamaro Washing, Dagwood Sleeping).

In the vast and quiet almost deserted space, Wesley makes comic book pop into a John Updike erotica, pastel and clean and explicit. The erotica is late, closing the show, like Picasso's minotaurs or Yeats's Crazy Jane poems. Does this happen to all men if they live long enough, the late blooming of a wild and mature sexuality, the autumnal exaltation of physical passion?

2009-07-28T03:17:00.000-07:00

ITHACA
A STORY

The Most Beautiful Song in the World

2009-07-27T14:47:00.000-07:00

Is this the most beautiful song in the world?

Poem by Friedrich Rückert
Music by Gustav Mahler

It certainly is in my book. In fact, it stands alone. There are plenty of beautiful songs in the world, but there is nothing else quite like this.

It is frequently referred to at the saddest song ever written, but I think that is based on recent performance practice, and not on the essence of the song. The poem which Mahler set to music is simplicity itself and yet easily misread:

I am lost to the world
with which I used to waste so much time,
It has heard nothing from me for so long
that it may very well believe that I am dead!

It is of no consequence to me
Whether it thinks me dead;
I cannot deny it,
for I really am dead to the world.

I am dead to the world's tumult,
And I rest in a quiet realm!
I live alone in my heaven,
In my love and in my song!

It is often sung in a valedictory manner, a sad farewell to life, but that also misses the point. The poet is describing an ecstatic state, in which the noise and vanity of the world ceases to matter and all that matters is his heaven of love and song. It is a farewell in the same way awaking is a farewell to a troubled sleep. Good bye, yes, but to everything that doesn't really matter in order to embrace what really does. That is why the music is quiet, intensely spiritual in character, as simple as sunlight on water and as gorgeous. It is so beautiful it makes us cry.

Deby once wondered aloud why beautiful music that is not dramatically sad makes us cry. I suggested that it is because it plugs us directly into that which is greater than ourselves and our consciousness, with other worlds if you will, what the Romantics referred to the Sublime. We are humbled and exalted in the same moment, and that moves us to tears just as an intense orgasm can move us to tears, and certainly not from sadness. We experience ecstasy.

When Nature, the foremost teacher of all great art, presents us with the sublime -- the first glimpse of the waterfalls tumbling into Yosemite Valley, the extraordinary blue of the Tyrrhenian Sea seen from Tiberius's villa on Capri, Big Sur or the Dolomites at dawn -- it is without affect; it has no emotional content. It is a pure expression of the beauty and majesty of creation. It takes your breath away but does not necessarily make you cry.

To the pure light of Nature's beauty, Art applies the prism of human consciousness and emotion; the beam is refracted into its component colors and woven into patterns for particular effect. Humanity is added to impersonal nature and it is this experience of our humanity, of or our common emotional life, that is so particularly powerful and touching. We know, in that instant, that others have trod the same path, that our planet is inhabited by others with hearts like our own, that we are not alone in the universe. The message makes our souls dance.

Recently this song has been sung very slowly. The mournful oboes and clarinets against the soft harp arpeggios, the muted strings, are elegiac, quietly dirge-like. Jessie Norman and Zubin Mehta take an inertial 8 minutes. Janet Baker clocks in at 6:47, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson at 7:13.

An earlier generation of artists took a faster tempo. Kathleen Ferrier's version is 5:38. That seemingly slight change of tempo changes the entire mood of the song.

Irmgard Seefried clocks in at a mere 5:10 in a performance that is a revelation. From the opening bars the song has more in common with the innocent rapture of the last movement of the Fourth Symphony, where the light childlike soprano sings Das himmlische leben (Heaven's life), than it does with the truly mournful Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony, its twin sister in line and orchestral texture.

Seefried's voice is immediate and unaffected; she is in touch with the source of this music and she is clearly on a spiritual journey as she sings. At the end she is not sad at all; she is filled with radiant joy. Her smile says it all.

So why do I cry?

An exquisite flower fills me with joy and does not make me cry. But at the end of the song I am filled with joy and I am crying. It is because this heady emotional cocktail is suffused with gratitude and wonder at being alive and able to experience such beauty. That is what the song is about: being set free from the squalor and the madness of the world so you can experience its beauty and express that joy.

As the poet says,

I am dead to the world's tumult,
And I rest in a quiet realm!
I live alone in my heaven,
In my love and in my song!

Something Strange Happened Here

2009-07-21T07:56:00.000-07:00

The odd thing is, something strange did happen.

I started out to go to the part of the Biennale you reach from the Bacini vaporetto stop. Robin had told me about some interesting things there, including another video from the Russians who kicked out the jambs in 2007 with a stellar three-screen video event.

There is no easy way to get there; it is a remote corner of Venice, and you take the 41 or 42 depending on which way you are coming from. On the way, the motoscafo stopped at Certosa and I thought maybe I should get off there, since I had never been there and Robln had also described some interesting things there. But I stayed onboard, figuring that if I had the energy I could swing by on my way back. It was very hot, the sun brilliant, and not the best day for trekking outdoors.

I also neglected to eat anything this morning. I had coffee, and that was all. I was getting very thirsty and hungry, and was completely annoyed at myself when I got off at Bacini and realized that as part of the Arsenale half of the Biennale, these exhibitions, although geographically separate, were also closed on Tuesdays.

I was on the motoscafo back toward Certosa when it happened. I was feeling very good up to then, but a wave of anxiety swept over me, small at first, intensifying as inexorably as a Rossini crescendo. I felt anguish and uncertainty about the future, a good sign that some bad waves were generating deep down my brain stem. The motoscafi are not like the vaporetti; they are smaller, narrower, and closer to the water. The 41 cuts through the lagoon where it is often rocked by serious wake from the heavy boat traffic around it. It was hard to stand. I felt woozy and weak-kneed and had to sit down. I tried to be rational and remind myself that I was alert and breathing albeit dizzy and a little seasick. But for those moments, everything seemed to be closing in a tight vortex, Sartre's nausea. I was tempted to get off at S. Pietro, to stand on solid ground, but stayed seated; as the boat neared Certosa I stood, unsteadily, and climbed to the deck where the fresh air was brisk and reinvigorating.

I started feeling better as soon as I got off the boat. The breezes on Certosa dried up my cold sweat, and as I walked the long jetty the other symptoms seemed to pass. I was hungry and thirsty but the intense dizziness dissipated with solid ground under my feet.

Which is when I thought: that's how it happens. It. The big one. The 9 magnitude on the mortality scale. It doesn't come announced; it comes in the instant and totally blows your mind as well as whatever other systems fail.

I counted back from ten, went through the days of the week, named as many presidents as I could, recited the No. 1 vaporetto stops from P.le Roma to Lido and back again. I knew who and where I was, and I was beginning to ease back into the beauty of the afternoon and the peculiar landscape of Certosa. But the hot breath of mortality, the most intense anguish, leaves its imprint, like the time I choked on a piece of candy and was fading to black before the Tootsie roll was Heimliched out of me. It startled me, and then it passed, like the waves. It made me think differently.

As you approach on the very long jetty from the vaporetto stop you notice three things immediately: the enormous elephant, trunk raised, wading into the lagoon; the chrome ring that frames the view like a circular silver frame, and the rows and rows of expensive boats cued up along the fondamentas, people in bathing suits working on them in the fierce lagoon sun.

I walked through the fancy hotel complex and explored several of the paths leading into the island. Certosa is rather large, and having no idea where the footpaths led, and given the temperature and my persisting unease at whatever had just happened, I headed back to the vaporetto stop, caught a 42 to Arsenale, and had a rolled pizza vegetariano and an acqua frizzante under the shade of a pale umbrella. I had sat under the same umbrella in San GImignano, and in Firenze. The waiter asked me about Richard, and I stopped by Paolo's to tell them "ciao" from Riccardo.

Everything was the same, but the view was different. The moment was different. The past was different. The future was different. And finally having regained something of a sense of well-being, I headed home to record it here, because it was a trigger point, one of those reminders one stumbles into whenever one assumes one knows what is really going on.

The message: you never know. You do your best.

There were some splendid views on Certosa; juxtapositions of nature and utility that raised the question: what is art? Can it be something utterly unintentional, that viewed in a certain way becomes extraordinarily beautiful; a sort of found art. Is art, like beauty, truly in the eye of the beholder?

I am not becoming a solipsist, an unreconstructed relativist, but from what little I understand of the quantum physics, we change things by experiencing them, the past and the future interpenetrate the present, and sometimes nature collapses into one moment the full impact of our mortality, to humble us and make us greatful, and if we are smart, we listen.

THE STORY IN PICTURES

Gli uccelli cantono nel giardino

2009-07-21T01:10:00.000-07:00

I am a complete idiot musically; I cannot read a score and often cannot follow the inner lines. But music moves me to distraction. It is the one constant in my life and I know it will never fail me. It has always been there, and always will. I can honestly say that the Faure Requiem has saved my life.

That being said, sometimes I turn the music off, open the windows and listen to the birds.

I am at the moment quite lucky. I have two immense windows that open onto a walled garden lined with trees. These are mature trees, old like me, huge and leafy in summer and spectral skeletons all winter long. I have never lived among trees this large, and at night the wind through their branches sounds like rushing water.

There are other trees nearby, in gardens and on terraces. This is something of a green oasis in brick and stone Venice and the result is that birds love to hang out here. The got drunk on strange berries; nested in the palms all spring. You don't see them as much as hear them. And often, for hours, they converse from their hidden shady bowers.

There are no seagulls here. When I lived in Santa Croce I heard seagulls constantly. Sometimes they sound like they are laughing loudly; other times they imitate cats or babies. They are clever imposters, loud and ballsy, and hang around the garbage cans in the campo. A big seagull with a roost on a high chimney swoops down, lifts plastic bags of garbage from the cans, drops them on the paving stones, and proceeds to tear the bag open with his beak and scatter the luxurious horde of orange peels and coffee grounds and table scrapings. Then the pigeons move in, feasting on the leftovers. The pigeons are mostly silent; the seagulls raucous, garrulous, comical. They can also be macabre, as when I saw two seagulls feasting on a dead pigeon.

The birds that hang out around the garden are different; no pigeons to speak of, no seagulls. They are songbirds and at various times of day differing choirs of them sing and chatter. I know less about birds than I do about music, so I cannot tell you what kinds of birds they are, except for the small grey and brown sparrow types. But I know there are many different kinds, even though I don't see them. Their songs are distinct and musical, madrigals, arias, choruses, duets and trios; dolce, agitato, con brio, con amore. It is easy to hear the direct line from these songs to human music.

When I listen to them I often think about St. Francis, who preached to them as an integral part of creation and, reportedly, they swooned and soared and sang their responses. It was not a matter so much of Francis "understanding" them, as in "I Talk to the Animals," or as we converse among ourselves as humans. It was about embracing them as brothers and sisters in the great circle of life. He reached out to them and they responded; it was all about the vibes.

Like music.

In the realm of human art the birds can speak our language, issue somber warnings from the mysterious gods, they can soar and ruffle their feathers and sing, and when they sing, a character like Siegfried can understand and reply. The Forest Bird tells him fabulous secrets that are steps in the footpath of destiny. As he lies dying he sings the music of the Forest Bird and the poignancy of this music is matched only by the return of the music of Brunnhilde's awakening.

But that's opera; another story completely!

Festa del Redentore 2009

2009-07-19T04:13:00.000-07:00

The Festa del Redentore is spiritually centered in the Church of Redentore, one of Palladio's masterpieces. Started in 1576, the church was built ex voto for relief from an outbreak of plague. It is a triumphal statement of humble gratitude and grandiose self-glorification.

But socially the Festa is centered on St. Mark's Basin, where thousands of people crowd in boats for a long evening of partying, and along the fondamentas of the Giudecca canal, and on any balcony or altana with a view.

A pontoon bridge is erected across the 300m canal which is closed to normal traffic. From the opening of the Church until the dissolution of the Venetian Republic by Napoleon, the Doges crossed a bridge built on boats in a solemn procession from San Marco to the Redentore.

But the real highlight of the weekend now is the midnight fireworks display in St. Mark's Basin, over the heads of the boats crowded below. Traditionally the boats were decorated with flowers and lanterns and the kind of kitsch Italians love to distraction; today one sees a preponderance of plain rented boats filled with kegs and watermelons and sandwiches; the people eat and drink and party, loud music blaring and at dawn there are beach parties on the Lido.

Frank and Liesl's altana is the perfect place to watch the fireworks. Their top floor apartment is on the west side of the Church of the Redentore; their altana has a sweeping view of Venice, from Marghera to Lido, to say nothing of the fireworks. Above the noise and below the fireworks, their altana is a place of enchantment.

I went with my new neighbor, Erika, who is an old friend of Liesl. Maestro, Erika's miniature pinscher, young and unschooled in the ways of Venice, made it on foot along the Zattere but when we hit the pontoon bridge he went into his carrying case. At 8pm it was still broad daylight, the fireworks hours off and the partying just beginning to crank up along the fondamenta.

Liesl served a five-course sit down dinner on the altana; she gets a Great Hostess Award! The tuna mousse was an absolute knockout, and everything on par with it. Dolci finished just in time for the fireworks.

The show is long and spectacular. It begins at 11-30 and the grand finale is a fireworks-filled hour later. The Venetians have been playing with fireworks since Marco Polo visited China and they have perfected the art of beautiful displays. This year's show had moments of spectacularly blazing beauty.

Fireworks are an art of the moment. They do not last. They explode and disappear in an instant and tell a whole story in the process. Watching them, adults become children. The children, who had been anxiously waiting all day, fell into a deep and exhausted sleep before the show ever ended, but the adults gazed in open-mouthed wonder.

If there is a perfect expression of bliss, triumphant bliss, it is fireworks. They soar and sparkle and dance. You cannot fix them in time nor cling to them beyond the moment in which they happen. It is a singular instant, now, to be savored and let go, like an amuse bouche for the soul.

Afterward, before fighting our way back across the crowded pontoon bridge, Erika bought a big white fluff of cotton candy. Children. Children of all ages at the Fair. Tired and dazzled and exhilarated.

My attempts to capture the elusive are in the FIREWORKS GALLERY.

Punta della Dogana ROCKS

2009-07-15T11:39:00.001-07:00

Wow.

I just got back from my first visit to the Pinhault collection at the Punta della Dogana. It is the best Biennale-related art I have seen to date.

Francois Pinhault's eye, whoever that may be, is brilliant. Here, on a triangular point of land between the Giudecca and Grand Canals, in the shadow of Santa Maria della Salute, Pinhault waved his magic wand -- i.e., a vast fortune and the vision of his architect -- and conjured a masterpiece from the derelict Customs House.

This applies not only to the art collection but to the choice of building, its location, and its restoration by Tadeo Andao. Seeing certain pieces framed by the structure in brick arches, perforated concrete and plate glass enhances them; the building provides endless points-of-view for looking.

The exterior has been rubbed and scrubbed and is a delight to see in full once again; the interior probably could not have been done better. The appearance of the old brick walls and carved structural timbers is pristine. The elegant grey concrete is a soothing complement. The lighting is spot on, from the natural light through ample windows and skylights to the artificial light which is only in a few instances obtrusive. The exterior views, some of the most gorgeous in Venice, surround: Zitelle and San Giorgio, the Grand Canal, the Piazzetta and the Basin of San Marco.

Secondo me, the best of modern art, like the best of old art, tells stories with equal parts artistry and vision. What makes Guernica so outstanding, the story it tells, its apocalyptic vision, is what makes Jake and Dinos Chapman's "Fucking Hell" such an astonishing vision. Intricate yet epic, it has all the power of the bottom portion of a Last Judgment. Thousands of figures of wretched and demonic soldiers are engaged in apocalyptic battles in 9 glass cases, from a battle on the Acropolis to prison camps straight from Apocalypse Now via Hieronymous Bosch; from Auschwitz to Hiroshima, from Marathon to Armageddon, all raised to the Nth degree, a catalog of hell as complete as Dante's populous Inferno. In the central case the volcano upon which the battle rages erupts in a mushroom cloud that can be seen from every angle in the room.

At the other end of the visionary spectrum, Murakami's "Lonesome Cowboy" is an exuberant spin (literally) on Donatello's insouciant bronze David at the Bargello, with the addition of a raging hard-on and a stellar ejaculation that swirls around his head like a cloud. His eyes literally twinkle.

Between and among these works, there is craftsmanship and vision; along with the anguish there is giddy exaltation, and flights of pure fantasy. In a darkened room imaginary cities are sculpted from orange and lime and grape jello lit from within (Mike Kelley, Kandors Full Set, 2005-2009, mixed media). Between the miniature cities enormous glass jars reflect orbits of light.

It was rather startling to realize that the shrouded bodies on the floor of one of the galleries, which could have been plastic or plaster, were carved from Carrara marble and glisten with a satin sheen (Maurizio Cattelan, All, 2008). Nine pieces, each different, the end of a unique human life.

If contemporary art speaks to you at all, the Punta della Dogana is certain to blow your mind. Having very recently spent innumerable hours looking at medieval and renaissance art in Venice and Padova and Florence and Assisi and San GImignano, I can say that Murakami's Lonesome Cowboy is very much in the spirit of the renaissance, only here the homoeroticism is explicit. The piece, and its companion, a vixenish sex kitten squeezing whipped cream from her enormous breasts, are very much in the tradition of the equally lifelike painted wooden figures of saints and martyrs. But Murakami's spirits have been set free from the constraints of religious and artistic convention; they are paradigms of pure sexual delight. The Lonesome Cowboy's affect is simply joyous, from he delirious smile to his spiky yellow hair crowning his head like a feathery halo.

Matthew Day Jackson's Dynamaxion Kinfolk (2009) is a construction, in a mirrored glass case, of a double file of marching skeletons reflected to infinity and composed of tree branches, bones, metal, shoes (officially "aluminum, lead, iron, mirror, wood, mechanical replacement joints, plastic, lights, formica"). In a case on the opposite wall a simple black pyramid ("painted wood, burnt wood, glue) is morphed in 21 brilliantly colored stages into a human skull.

I made two tours through the galleries before leaving, but first I had a coffee in the cafe and climbed up into the Belvedere for the 360-degree panorama glimpsed through the metal latticework that covers the windows.

As in all shows, everything is not equally good, and what thrills me may not thrill you; however, something will. It's that kind of collection. It is far ranging, incorporates a broad gamut of styles, and each is eloquent. It was an exhibition that was hard to leave, and one I will be returning to.

Bringing the outside in

2009-07-15T10:28:00.001-07:00

Venice-style...

San Gimignano | Towers and Walls

2009-07-13T11:21:00.000-07:00

The Historic Center of San Gimignano is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, by virtue of satisfying the following three of UNESCO's criteria:

Criterion (i): represents a masterpiece of human creative genius.
Criterion (iii): bears unique (or at least extraordinary) testimony to a cultural tradition or civilisation, either currently existing or from the past.
Criterion (iv): is an exceptional example of a type of construction or architectonic or technological or landscape-related complex that bears witness to important steps in human history.

This largely refers to the towers. At one point there were seventy-two towers in San Gimignano. The tallest, the Torre Grossa, is 180 feet, the others are shorter, at varying heights. The towers are iconic, the trademark, the brand, if you will, of the Theme Park, but it was the walls that spoke to me.

The hills are steep and the walls are crooked, at odd angles. It is extremely difficult to discern their age; some of the bricks may in fact be Roman although the bulk of the construction is medieval, built during a historically brief burst of commerce and fortune between the eleventh century and the Black Plague.

These walls represent a time when a city could keep the outside out and the inside in with brick and stone. Inside the city walls are the interior walls, the walls of the buildings themselves. They are densely textured, their colors variegated. They have been ravaged by war, disaster, and time and repaired by men's hands as often as they were ravaged. They stand today almost as capable as ever to perform their original function although the world in which that had value no longer exists. Today they are an object of admiration for the beauty of their construction and their miraculous endurance. Once we built well, for the ages.

The other day I had drinks with my friend Ann from London. She said, slyly and seriously, "I won't get out of bed unless a city is at least a thousand years old." There was no hint of snobbery in her tone. She spent her entire academic career as a classicist; her ideal of beauty is ancient Greece. When she retired she volunteered as a guide at the British Museum because she enjoyed sharing her knowledge of the Parthenon marbles and other treasures. She knows what she likes and can choose where she goes; that road leads to places rooted in the deep past.

It is not just the art of these ancient places that speaks. It is the walls themselves, the walls and arches, the towers and portals and gates which tell the marvelous story of ingenuity and artistry evolved over time in response to the specific characteristics of place.

The walls of Assisi are pink from the pink stone of Mount Subasio. The walls of San Gimignano range from deep brick red to wheat and sand. They tell the story of how a certain spot, by virtue of its natural endowments, its geological DNA, became an Etruscan settlement, a Roman camp, and then a city. These cities sat on hilltops because from there you could see the surrounding valley, the movements of downhill neighbors and the encroachment of enemies. They were walled to enclose them and crowned with fortresses to protect them.

In the shadow of these structures rose centers of culture and commerce and, in the case of Assisi, religious pilgrimage. All of these strands of history are woven into the fabric of the walls, and can be read there, like runes embroidered by time. The stories they tell are seamed with the mortar of our shared humanity. But the march of progress no longer leads through their steep rocky streets, and they are vestigial places turned into Theme Parks, tourist centers. Still, they stand as they have stood for almost a thousand years.

How will our cities fare in the future, the cities built in the nineteenth and twentieth and twenty-first centuries? How will they look in eight hundred years? Will they be as proud, ambitious, and beautiful as these walls and towers, as the Parthenon or the Pantheon or the Pyramids? Or will they be grotesque ruins of unsustainable hubris, collapsed and deserted like the homes with the mortgages that became unpayable and were abandoned the way a hermit crab abandons its cast-off shell?

[ WALLS AND TOWERS]

Florence | Verdi Requiem

2009-07-13T07:14:00.000-07:00

They charge a lot of money to get into the Boboli Gardens and there's not a lot of garden to show for it. The formal structure is there, outlined in tall shady trees, stone stairs and terraces, but there are no plantings, no flowers. It is certainly different from what it must have been in centuries past, either as a home to Medicis or as the chief residence of the ruling families of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, as an ornamental Napoleonic redoubt or as a gaudy Austrian belle epoque showplace. How rich they must have been to afford these sprawling acres of gardens and ponds and fountains, and yet, even with them, their reach habitually exceeded their grasp and the landscape is littered with unfinished Grand Projects. (The same holds true, notoriously, for the Capella Medici in the San Lorenzo compound.) Everything has limits, but every Prince needed to create, as nearly as possible, an earthly paradise as monument to his grandeur.

The arena is in a far corner of the Boboli Gardens by the Porta Romana. It is the sort of pipe-and-tarp construction you see at a rock concert, with a short parterre and a long slope of bleachers on a grassy lawn encircled by very old trees. Here and there niches are cut into the surrounding hedge housing weathered baroque sculptures, traditional Roman busts mostly, except for the whimsical trio of goofballs, three grotesque figures sticking out their tongues and making faces, and, across the gravel footpath from them, a pair of fellows who appear to be blown backward by the wind as they try to fly kites; but there are no kites. Above the tall hedges you see a roofscape of stucco and tile, altanas and television aerials.

An international summer festival crowd has gathered for this performance of Verdi's Requiem; you see everything from long black dresses to jeans or short skirts with skimpy tops as well as everything in between. My fifth row seat in the parterre is almost too close for comfort. The crowd around me is well-heeled and bourgeois; hand-kissing is as unaffectedly natural as saying "ciao." It appears that one cell phone is no longer sufficient. A nattily dressed gentleman standing in the aisle wields two, one in each hand. On the cool lawn to the right of the stage the musicians and smokers mill around before the performance. A lone trumpeter stands off in a corner practicing his licks; it is a big night for the brass section.

It is also a big night in Florence.There is a white-haired gentleman of a certain age in a white linen suit, blue shirt, red bow tie, and a red carnation in his lapel (despite the wilting heat). The men are wearing gorgeous suits, the women are wearing jewels, and everyone seems to know each other, including the big, fabulous American-speaking blonde in the front row who I assume is Mrs. Mehta.

Photographers, presumably the local press, are taking pictures of them all and seem to know exactly who they are. It takes a while for everyone to settle down for the real purpose for being there: the music.

To Wagner's complaint that with his Requiem Verdi had dragged the opera house into the church came the reply came that Wagner was no one to talk, having dragged the church into the opera house with Parsifal. But performances of the Requiem, like all the big symphonic liturgical events, inspires a certain reverence. Maestro Mehta made a short speech in Italian dedicating the performance, from all of the musicians' hearts, to the victims at Viareggio and Aquila, and to a Florentine of note whose name I did not catch, recently dead. He asked the audience to please refrain from applause and to leave quietly at the performance's end.

As with an opera, a successful performance requires the best of both the orchestral forces and the quartet of vocal soloists; there are arias, certainly, but this is an ensemble piece par excellence.

The tenor, Fabio Sartore, is a huge man, Pavarotti huge, with a huge voice whose cruising volume is loud and whose loud is very very loud. He sang touchingly in the quiet moments, with his voice under control, but there was no middle between that and very, very loud; consequently the duets, trios and quartets in which he participated were unbalanced, his voice dominating.

The soprano, the mezzo and the bass were more finely tuned, and among them the ensembles were well balanced. Each vocal line could be heard, and their voices blended naturally at delicately nuanced volumes.

I had heard the soprano, Anna Samuil, in Berlin as Donna Anna. Here as there, she is an attractive women with a lovely voice. She wore a diva glam gown and was beautifully made up. Vocally she was convincing and musical, but nothing sent shivers up my spine until the closing Libera Me when her voice exploded into technicolor. On the other hand, the mezzo, Anna Smirnova seemed to be wearing no makeup, was anything but glammed up, and sang with a deeply convincing conviction, eyes often closed. Freed from the dramatic constraints of the opera stage, which, on all but rare occasions, the big moments are thrown to the soprano, in his Requiem Verdi was able to indulge in his love of the mezzo voice, and he gives her stupendous music that Smirnova sang with Verdi in her heart, from a whisper to a full-on torrent of glorious, beautifully pitched sound.

If you ever wondered what a Rafaello angel or stable-boy looked like in his thirties, watch bass Alexander Tsymbalyuk. He is as handsome as his voice, tall and imposing onstage, his instrument as dark and silky as the black satin lapels of his tuxedo. From his hushed "Mors, stupebit," to the urgently lyrical Confutatis, to the bone-crushing climaxes of the full-tilt "Rex Tremendae" he sang with poetry and with soul.

The opening was so hushed as to hover like a fine mist over the stage. As in his Gotterdammerung in May, Mehta incited barbaric splendor from the orchestra, as well as the softest sighs and soaring melodies. He has grown as an artist I have heard over many years; his Gotterdammerung and Requiem, both eschatological extravaganzas, were served up with equal amounts of gravitas and splendor.

There were no bravi, although there should have been; and as the audience crowded out silently, the whisper of "bellissima" was ubiquitous.

A Monday morning

2009-07-13T04:51:00.000-07:00

Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti
Headed out for the John Wesley show on San Giorgio Maggiore and realized halfway there that it was probably closed today.

One my way I stopped in Palazzo Loredan, part of the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, in Campo S. Stefano. I was lured in by a small video installation for the Biennale (L'Anima della pietra by Fabrizio Plessi), but the rooms that described the history and function of the Istituto were were much more interesting. Unfortunately, the rest of the Palazzo is only open to look at for Culture Week in April. The renaissance building was done up extensively inside in the baroque style with 18th c. frescoes.

The Istituto is devoted to promoting and protecting the sciences, humanities and the arts and it has tremendous historical archives; its online databases are considered among the finest in Europe.

They have programs and prizes in everything from lung cancer treatment to the ecology and future of the lagoon to art and literature, and the history and current state of Italy.

San Moise
The first time I saw San Moise its time blackened facade transformed its swarming statuary into photo-negative. Now, clean, in the bright sunlight, it is easy to see the intrinsic ugliness which Ruskin abhorred. But the altar sculpture, Moses receiving the 10 commandments on Mount Sinai, is strangely stunning and there is beautiful baroque stonework inside.

San Giorgio
As I suspected, the John Wesley show was closed, but between vaporettos I had time to notice how the great Palladio church has a sand-blasted appearance; it's smooth, clean surfaces make you wonder what the original stone must have looked like, sharply cut in shiny marble, bright white Istrian stone. Today's buffed surface, absent edges, is a clean but mute testimony to the erosion of time. It also makes me long to see the facade as conceived and designed by Palladio, with the porch thrusting in true Roman style toward the water of the bacino; a design the conservative Dominican friars scrapped as soon as Palladio died, reducing his concept to an echo of the superimposed facade of Redentore.

Gotterdammerung at La Fenice

2009-07-10T07:05:00.000-07:00

I saw the world end twice in two months, which is a lot. But each time was radically different.

The Zubin Mehta-Fura dels Baus-Maggio Musicale Cirque du Soleil / Star Wars version of Wagner's Gotterdammerung was higher on spectacle but lower on psychologtical depth, while the Jeffrey Tate-Robert Carsten-Fenice production was lower on spectacle and profoundly moving psychologically.

I only saw the Florence Gotterdammerg, so I don't know how the first three operas of their cycle were handled. But I have watched the Fenice Ring grow and develop, stumbling through cast changes and delays and still without a production of Rheingold, the first part, which they skipped. But the vision has been consistent, both musically, in the hands of Maestro Tate, and dramatically, in the hands of Robert Carsten.

The sets and costumes are realistic, a war-torn mis-en-scene in which Valhalla was a fabulous penthouse and the Hall of the Gibichungs a monolithic fascist-style office, a totalitarian nightmare 1950's style.

As the opera opens the Norns, three blind sisters who weave the fabric of destiny, find that the rope has snapped and the future of their universe has ended. In Florence they were suspended, floating above the stage, eerie and magical. At Fenice, they were caretakers in the basement of the universe in which Valhalla was the penthouse, arranging the detritus of the world, wrapping the rope of fate on on picture frames and furniture and bundled slabs of the World Ash Tree as they lament "the eternal knowing is ended."

As the scene changes to the Valkyrie rock, Siegfried, Stefan Vinke, and Brunnhilde, Jayne Casselman, are still entangled in passionate sex as the sun rises. You get the feeling nothing could stop them, that they are so happy that the world could end without their noticing. Unfortunately, it doesn't let them.

Siegfried resembles a buzz-cut Marine bear in fatiques, chunky and frisky. Brunnhilde is a blonde vixen, part biker girl, part earth mother, cut from the Jessica Lange mold. Once a demigod, she retains some of her former grandeur, but for the moment she is all human, a woman passionately in love. They cannot keep their hands off each other. And when she gives him her beloved steed, he reacts as if he had just been given the keys to a magnificent new Harley, every boy's dream come true: the woman he loves and the ride to match.

Nothing this Siegfried did matched Lance Ryan's singing suspended upside down, or the astonishingly soaring ease of his final scene after four hours of singing, in Florence. But Stefan Vinke was splendid, always convincing, agile and impetuous and passionate. His energy never faltered and he sang his final scenes with the same gripping intensity as the first act duet.

La Fenice loved their voices; at the climax of their duet, they rang true and clear over the orchestra. The size of the space did not extend beyond the effective range of their instruments. They could sing more naturally, less pushed. And Jeffrey Tate is a considerate conductor, always scaling the orchestra so that the voices can be heard. If I were a singer, I would love him. You only realize, at the peak non-vocal moments, just how loud the orchestra can play with the governor off. At the great orchestral-vocal climaxes the voices could be heard as the final layer of a complex sound, but did not dominate, as they could and, sometimes, should.

In Florence's Teatro Communale the orchestra did overwhelm the voices at times, but Zubin Mehta has grown as a conductor since his earlier days when I considered him something of a lightweight. He shaped the music beautifully, and the brutal chords of the Funeral March were shattering. Tate's reading was less cataclysmic, but beautifully and deeply musical. The orchestra expressed the emotional subtext as the singers acted out the wrenching human drama. Tate and the orchestra got the biggest ovations of the night, a nose ahead of Brunnhilde who was loudly adored.

Jayne Casselman's transitions from ecstatic bride to abject victim of brutal betrayals were filled with physical detail and musical nuance. By the time she reaches bottom and betrays Siegfried, who has betrayed her, she is Blanche DuBois. Siegfried, drugged with a magic potion, honestly does not remember her; and she just can't believe it. The horror grows as she realizes that everyone in the room is on the same page as Siegfried and she stands alone, completely and utterly betrayed. Is that not the essence of madness, perceiving the world in a way that everyone says is fantasy? To Siegfried's fierce oath that he has never seen her before, she swears even more fiercely that she is his bride and he has betrayed her, even though no one believes her and everyone thinks she is crazy.

But it is only drugged Siegfried who doesn't believe her; the other main characters all know exactly what is going on, which makes Brunnhilde's apparent paranoia even more siniser. There is, first and foremost, Hagen, who gave Siegfried the potion and conceived the plot against Brunnhilde. In Florence, Hans Peter Konig as Hagen had an amazing barrel-organ bass that was capable of lifting you right off your seat. He was gripping and compelling and his voice is a force of nature. The Fenice Hagen, GIdon Saks, was suave and insinuating, both sly and ominous, handsome and fearsome, but his singing did not surpass the memory of Konig.

The Fenice production did not need gimmicks, laser lights, bungee cords or floating aquaria in which the Rhine Maidens sang, actually submerged, in Florence. This was a fourth wall production and what we watched was taken seriously, literally, and was starkly real.

So how, in that framework, do you handle the end of the world? The stage directions are impossible-- as Brunnhilde rides her horse into Siegfried's funeral pyre the fire rises up, the Gibichung Hall collapses, on high Valhalla burns, and then the Rhine overflows its banks, everything dissolving in primal chaos. In Florence it was a 60's-ish son et lumiere affaire, with a magical constellation of bodies writhing in mid-air.

But Carsten did something I have never seen before.

Brunnhilde stepped forward to the front of the stage and a wall slid down behind her. She stood alone in the spotlight, and delivered Brunnhilde's Immolation Scene as if it were a Shakespearean monolog, a confidence between her and us. It is a mad proposition; everything rides on how convincing the performance is. Nothing is more exposed than standing alone on the stage bearing the entire weight of the drama, stripped of the usual theatrical shenannigans. The miracle is that it worked.

Casselman took us along with her every step of the way, and when the singing ended the curtain rose on an empty stage swathed in mist. Brunnhilde walked stage center, raising her arms as a purifying rain fell. The orchestra told the rest of the story, how love is the ultimate redemption of the world. In Florence at that point they pushed two massive blocks onto the stage upon which "L'amour" was written when they met in the center. You didn't need that reminder at La Fenice. You felt it in Brunnhilde's exaltatation, as she, along with the music, disappeared.

San Gimignano | The medieval laundromat

2009-07-06T13:37:00.000-07:00

Imagine you live in a town of a few thousand people, located on a hilltop, encircled by walls and miles distant from the nearest river. Include in your imaginings that there is neither electricity nor plumbing, your only vehicle is a beast of burden and, if you're lucky, a cart, and that you live in a strange tower hundreds of feet high with an interior space of at most 30 square feet, no windows, no toilets, no running water.

Where would you do your laundry?

That accurately describes life in San Gimignano between the eleventh century, when the home of choice was a tall, narrow tower, to the end of the 14th century when, decimated by the Black Plague, the city was annexed by the Florentines and its independent existence effectively ended.

There was, of course, a solution to the laundry problem, a solution so enchanting that it belongs in a fairytale.

The solution is known as the Fonti Medievale, the medieval springs. To get there you exit the city through the Porta delle Fonti and head downhill.

Here the city built a series of arcaded pools in a cool spring-fed grotto.

In my imagination it is not all that different then from today.

It is a hot summer day; the hills are green. The air smells green. Across from the Fonti is the biggest fig tree I have ever seen, covered with figs still too small to eat, and creating dark bowers of shade. Further down the hill are berry bushes.

The unpaved path from the Fonti leads through gently sloping vineyards and scrub-covered hillsides into a valley between these hills and a the next range. The ranges recede in the humid summer mist like waves on the sea. Distant thunder rumbles occasionally, but there is no other sound outside of the buzz of bees and the soft burbling of water.

Three women, who appear to be French school teachers, come, admire, take pictures, and leave to do the walk around the city walls. The fonti are deserted, except for the golden orange fish that swim there now.

I imagine that in 1330, when the frescoes in the Duomo were being painted, it was a different scene. Women gathered around the Fonti to wash their laundry and, probably, themselves. The may have let the clothes soak in the pools while they sat under the fig tree eating ripe figs and drinking spring water or, perhaps, cool white wine.

They gossip and sing, washing their clothes and rinsing them, wringing them as dry as possible. Then they spread them out on the low bushes or hang them from the outer branches of the trees so that they are dry in less than two hours in the heat of the mid-day sun.

Winter was a different story, but I would venture that a lot more laundry was done in summer than in winter.

When the sun passes into the western sky, casting shadows over the hillside, they would take down the dry laundry and fold it, and load in onto their donkey, or into the sacks they may have tied to their own backs, and trudged back uphill toward the Porta delle Fonti.

[ THE FONTI MEDIEVALE]

San Gimignano: Theme Park with Towers

2009-07-05T13:42:00.000-07:00

I can hear the man behind me but I can't see him. I am quite certain he looks much like the man in front of me: bermudas, sandals (or sneakers with high white socks), a corny hat; he carries a map in one hand and a camera in the other. His backpack is stuffed with liter bottles of tepid water. His teenage daughter looks bored, Junior wants another gelato, and Mum is looking for cheap souvenirs in the shop windows.

Dad says, in fine British English, in a high moral tone as though setting Junior straight: "If it hadn't been for America I wouldn't have met Mummy and if I hadn't met Mummy you wouldn't be here." Junior, who has been dragged through three cities in as many days, looks like that mightn't be such a bad idea.

This could be a Theme Park. It is a Theme Park. Welcome to San Gimignano. The theme is Towers. Of the original 72, only dozen remain, but that's all it takes.

In the Piazza Duomo, the central square, people sit on the stone stairs of the Basilica. They are eating take-out sandwiches and taking pictures of each other. I stop in a bar for a wild boar salami sandwich with tomatoes and greens and chat with the waitress. I ask her how business is?

Terrible, she says. Nobody is buying anything except sandwiches and bottled water. The restaurants are empty. I tell her it is much the same in Venice, a larger theme park, but a theme park nonetheless, hit by the same downturn in tourism.

I ask her about walking to Certaldo, an even smaller town 11km away; not a bad walk, if it's not all su e giu, up and down. No, she says, it's all downhill, but, allora, uphill all the way back and the only bus is on Thursday. Besides, she says, it is too hot. Do that in April, she says. Not in the summer.

San Gimignano is barely three miles long and half as wide, a narrow swath of brick and stone atop a hill encircled by ancient walls. I had planned the walk to Certaldo the following afternoon. I wonder if there is enough of interest in San Gimignano for two full days?

San Gimignano was an Etruscan town in the 3rd C. BC, and history picks it up again in the 10th C. From its hilltop overlooking the Val d'Elsa it became key link on a major trade and pilgrimage route. The burghers of San Gimignano became rich, and as they became rich, each put up a tower until the town resembled a stone porcupine. The Duomo was consecrated in 1148; it is plain, forthright, unadorned; but inside, the high stone walls are covered with frescoes. The Old Testament Cycle on the left was painted by Bartolo di Fredi between 1356 and 1367. The New Testament Cycle was painted by Barna da Siena and Lippo Memmi.

Here you exit the Theme Park and enter the heart of the medieval imagination in full flower. I am slow, impatient and easily distracted. It sometimes takes a while for that transformation to sink in.

I quickly take the measure of the Duomo, scanning the nave frescoes and check out the Chapel of S. Fina. Frescoed by Ghirlandaio in 1478 the chapel is centered around a monumental gilt and marble altar/reliquary. (S. Fina, a local girl, died young, had visions, and was fast-tracked to sainthood so that San Gimignano could have one of their own.) The background of the fresco on the left is a grand Roman apse, open, in front of the towers of San GImignano. An angel hovers like a hummingbird near the belfry arches of the Torre Grossa, the big town hall tower which set the height limit and above which no private tower could go, looking then exactly as it looks now.

The chapel is pure renaissance, arranged like a theatrical event. The frescoes on the right and left walls flank the reliquary altar; polychrome stucco and marble curtains are swagged back like a proscenium to reveal the reliquary. In the center of the gilded marble is a small glass pane. Behind the glass is a lifelike painted wooden bust of a young girl; the saint's brain is supposed to be inside.

When I exit the chapel, the New Testment frescoes broadside me. I sit on a pew and stare in mute admiration. Admittedly most people have a low tolerance for these images, but I could look at them forever.

The first one that catches my eye is a panel depicting the Baptism of Christ by John the Baptist. It is a simple waterscape in greens, aquas and greys. In the panel below, Christ sits at its center like a deposed Byzantine emperor in a robe of gold silk lined in aqua over a garnet tunic. The vicious anger of his mockers dissolves in the calm and peaceful center of his blindfolded face. Next to that, the procession of the cross is a mad cacophony of jagged lines formed of crosses, spears and ladders, agitated, like lightning. This defies any stereotype of medieval art. It is a totally unique pictorial language, a dynamic medieval expressionism I have only seen here, par excellence, by Barna da Siena and Lippo Memmi, painted around 1330.

SPQR is embossed on the shields of the Roman foot soldiers while angels spin like pinwheels in the lurid crimson sky above the crucifixion. A haloed saint in imperial robes rides a horse whose hide is pink satin brocade. The silver designs on the soldiers' leather shields form spider webs around Christ being kissed by Judas. The prayer in the garden is visited by echoes of Rousseau and Rivera from the future. The last supper is a cubist arrangement of simple objects laid upon a white table surrounded by apostles.

By comparison, the Old Testament frescoes on the opposite side of the nave are more restrained and conventional, still fanciful and lovely in their approach to storytelling. But high up in the lunettes the story of Adam and Eve comprises a universe and a language all its own. It begins with a placid representation of Creation, almost abstract in its formal symbolism. Adam being given dominion over the beasts resembles a richly embroidered tapestry with lush and fantastic floral detail and a phalanx of animals -- a whole zoo -- massed behind him. Eve emerges from Adam's side whole, as from a womb.

The frescoes of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries are among the crown jewels of Italian art, running through Italy like a vein of pure gold. Taken as a body of work they are a wondrous fabric of art and imagination. They are festive and provocative, humble and exalted, profoundly touching and always fascinating to look at.

The Byzantine ideal was to reproduce endlessly the same perfect image, hence the extreme stylization; the style left little room for personality. In the renaissance, individuality gave way to idealized forms and classic beauty. In the medieval frescoes that ushered in the renaissance, personality prevails. The pathos of Jesus mocked is beyond words; it lives.

[ SAN GIMIGNANO SUITE]

2009-06-23T11:17:00.000-07:00

IT WASN'T THE FIRST CAMPING TRIP AND IT
WASN'T THE LAST, BUT IT WAS DEFINITELY ONE FOR THE BOOKS.

Venezia / Catalunya 2009

2009-06-14T10:38:00.001-07:00

The completion of the transformation of the old Customs House, the Punta della Dogana, into a showcase for French billionaire Francois Pinhault's contemporary art collection also means that once again you can walk all the way around the point, which you couldn't do for a very long time. Among other things, we have regained perhaps the perfect view of San GIorgio Maggiore, but it is also exciting to have a new museum by the same team that brought us Palazzo Grassi.

So in need of a walk on a blazingly sunny day, I decided to walk around the Punta della Dogana. I had done it last night in the dark and it was spectacular, with the colored lights of the mega-yachts moored in the Giudecca Canal in the lee of the Dogana casting reflections on the water.

Today, in full sun, it was another sort of pleasure. But more exciting was my stop into the Catalunya/Venezia pavilion, the Catalonian pavillion for the Biennale, located in the Magazzini del Sale, the old salt warehouses behind the Punta della Dogana. The magazzini have become many things of late, including a Vedova Museum and the offices of the Venetian Rowing Club; they are great spaces, almost three stories high, their walls brick and their ceilings beamed as in all Venetian warehouses of the period.

The Biennale is overwhelming. No longer confined to the Gardini and the Arsenale venues, it bursts all over the city. It will take six months to see and digest it, six months of casual visits when the time allows. The pavilions in the Giardini take a day or two, ditto the installations in the Arsenale, and then there is the wonderful serendipity of wandering into a pavilion set up somewhere in the city that you didn't realize was there, which is what happened today on my way to the Dogana.

The content of the Catalonian pavillion could take a couple days to see because, as is now all the rage, art exhibits feature computers packed with interesting information which require that you sit there and spend a lot of time. I am opposed to this. Just give me the URL and I can to that at home. What I want from an exhibit is the immediate and visceral impact of confronting a work of art head on in real time.

That finally happened first with a video piece, entitled "Honor." It works from the visual motif of a US Marines recruiting commercial, the men in polished ceremonial uniforms. Then it segues into a violent computer war game, intercut with young American soldiers, dressing in combat gear and getting ready for action in convincing cinema verite. In one sequence a helicopter driver gets suited up, and then the image shifts again to the computer game of a brutal helicopter attack.

The impact is shocking. It is compounded by the stark anti-American (anti-Bush-American) attitude. The artists and thinkers of the rest of the world, who don't have to listen to the insane ravings of American talk radio and have no nostalgia for Cold War America, look with a savage and critical eye.

Upstairs, in the mezzanine, is an even more powerful exhibit. It is a wall of hundreds of very slick advertising-type posters, but of a kind you don't see in magazines or subway stations or vaporetto stops. You will have to go to the gallery to see a few of them, and where the text may not be clear I have tried to include it in the captions.

I spent a long time with these posters. It was the kind of experience you hope for when you walk into a 21st century art exhibit: it was engaging, provocative, funny, beautiful, bursting with ideas.

[ CATALUNYA/VENEZIA GALLERY]

2009-06-12T10:54:00.000-07:00

[ Ruggero almost dropped his watering can, staggering in disbelief. The most exquisite creature he had ever seen was sunbathing naked on the altana of the adjacent roof just below his own. She appeared to be in her twenties and the perfection of her youth put Phidias and Bernini to shame.]

What I Am Thankful For Today

2009-06-04T13:15:00.000-07:00

I am thankful for the flowers in the garden in their annual succession, for the white and pink and scarlet hydrangea, for the jasmine covering the walls that perfumes the air, and the heavy white blossoms of the oleander with their own langorous fragrance.

I am thankful that there are people in this world I love and who love me. They give life to my heart the way the flowers please my senses.

I am thankful for this cold glass of water on a hot summer day. It is acqua di rubinetto, from the tap, and I am greatful that here the water tastes like its Alpine sources.

I am thankful for Palestrina, and here is why: because in all of Palestrina's music that I have heard, there is never a bad mood, barely ever a shadow to darken the harmony; Palestrina's music is to my ears what the scent of jasmine is to my nose.

Submarine piece for Biennale
I am thankful for the Biennale which opens this weekend. Venice comes to life in a different way for the Biennale. For the annual Film Festival it is Los Angeles, with movie stars and papparazzi; for Biennale it is New York, the art capital of the moment, the place where the parties and the shows and the people are all about art and the business of art and the world of art. You see it everywhere. You can't miss it. It is to Venice what lilacs are to spring.

I am thankful for Bar Palanca on Giudecca, where Richard and I met a friend for drinks and conversation with one of the best views in the cosmos. I am thankful for the golden light in the early dusk, and the mesmerizing reflections on the water, for fascinating boat traffic and the fun conversation.

I am thankful for the Corner Pub, around the corner from my apartment, where the neighborhood gathers in the evenings. The atmosphere is convivial and the people unfailingly interesting, with an odd mix of international tourists and locals, newbies and old-timers. Tonight I met a gorgeous young Italian woman, a medievalist, who teaches Italian language and culture at the university next door to the Guggenheim. She invited me to visit their palazzo and meet the folks. Her friend, it turns out, lived for four years in my apartment and for the six years before that in my friend Richard's apartment on the top floor. We swapped building stories; and that's a strange tale.

That's a lot to be thankful for in one day, but there is much more which I will not detail. Suffice it to say that every day there are wonderful things to be thankful for if we stop to notice them, to find them, to remember to savor them, and it sometimes helps put things in perspective to enumerate them. Some things on the list change, some never change.

If you have never heard Palestrina, here's a snatch from Youtube so you can hear what I mean:

Men in Uniform

2009-06-02T12:56:00.000-07:00

The Festa della Repubblica (Republic Day, 2 June) celebrates the reconstitution of the Italian Republic after World War 2. The big whoop, a monster military parade, is held in Rome. Here in Venice we got what amounted to an elaborate flag-raising ceremony.

The various armed forces were represented by men in uniform. They marched to canned music. It is hard to imagine that with all the unemployed and barely employed musicians in Venice, a decent band couldn't have been scraped up. Instead, recordings.

The contingents were announced, marched up the Piazzetta, and took their places at the base of the massive flag-poles that played a similar role in all the Ducal processions under the Venetian Republic. Meanwhile, the biggest brass they could muster were gathered on a red-carpeted podium in the lee of the Campanile. The Mayor of Venice was not to be seen among them.

After they contingents marched in and the national anthem was played, the flags were raised: the Italian flag, the flag of the European Union, and the Venetian flag. There was a thin smattering of applause; most of the spectators were tourists who had no idea what was going on.

After the flags were raised, the various contingents, from living heroes to fresh recruits, departed.

It was all about the uniforms. To see a few shots of the men in uniform, visit the gallery, where the story of the day is told in pictures.

[ MEN IN UNIFORM]

Two Butterflies

2009-05-28T14:37:00.000-07:00

Madama Butterfly is incredibly sad. It is heart-breakingly, tragically, cosmically sad. It meets the awe and terror quotient Aristotle described as intrinsic to tragedy. Their collision leads to the sublime, the direct experience of the mystery and majesty of the universe.

In great tragedy everything moves like clockwork, inexorably, to the catastrophe that climaxes the action and the rips open the seams of the world. There is nothing extraneous; each moment, each beat, leads another step closer to the unthinkable. And even though we, like the Greek audiences, know what is going to happen, the brilliance of the composer seduces us into believing in the changes the characters go through on the path of annihilation. We know. They don't. They tender hopes and dreams right up to the very end. This produces some mighty wondrous music.

The orchestra is not an accompaniment. Puccini learned a lot from Wagner. His orchestra is huge, and can create a mighty roar, just as it can sigh and whisper and croon delicately. At Fenice the exposed pit is roomy and when the orchestra fills the auditorium at full blast, it is an awesome and terrible thing for any singer to have to sing over. It takes special singers, spinto, "pushed," to soar over the orchestral climaxes and also have the restraint and musicality to deal with the countless tender moments, delicately scored and written to be sung softly.

I love Butterfly and was happy to see it in lineup this year, but a string of poor productions dampened my hopes for anything memorable. I was also dismayed to realize that my subscription, which is supposed to have only the "A" casts, in this case had the "B" cast. There was nothing I could do about it.

But the world of opera is peculiar, and one of the things all opera lovers dream about is the night the young singer you've never heard of blows the lid off the place.

Oksana Dyka is a 31-year-old Ukrainian soprano; she is svelte and attractive and is a commanding presence onstage. She has a large silvery voice that is so spinto it screams Turandot and beyond. The night belonged to her and to the conductor, Nicola Luisotti, who becomes the Music Director of the San Francisco Opera in September. Maestro Luisotti inspired the orchestra to a stunningly detailed rendering of the score, from the fading whisper of the humming chorus to the brutal and thunderous climaxes.

Whatever the orchestra did, Oksana's voice rode the crest like the Silver Surfer, ringing out true and clear. The same was not true for her Pinkerton. When the orchestra murmured softly, you heard his pretty tenor voice. But when the orchestra surged to full tilt, he was lost in the shuffle. My seat for this performance was my usual seat, platea, sixth row, center aisle. It wasn't a question of bad placement. Of the entire cast, only Cio-Cio San had the horsepower to always be heard distinctly.

That whetted my curiosity to hear the "A" cast, and so I bought a twenty-euro ticket for a "scarsa visibilita" seat in the loggione, high at the top of the theater. From there you see how shallow the platea is and how much floor space the pit takes up. Fenice is small, but not as small as it seems. The auditorium itself, the sound box, is over six floors high and shaped like a horseshoe. The open pit is fully exposed, and in that space the orchestra creates either a cushion or a wall of sound depending on the moment.

My loggione seat is in the front row but you really can't see anything. I am as close to the ceiling as you can get. I can almost touch the sea maidens buoyed on the ceiling cornices, a gold baroque froth the late lamented Stuart Miller called "snail trails." But I saw the production last night, from the best possible viewpoint so it really doesn't matter that tonight all I can see is the horseshoe of boxes in which the usual excessive amount of picture-taking takes place before the houselights go down.

My seat is also far forward, toward the stage. I have a magnificent view of the orchestra below although I can only occasionally see the singers. What impressed most from this perch is how well I can hear various solo instruments warming up in the pit, a single trombone, a lone oboe, a few strings. Their sound is immediate and clear and present despite the ambient noise in the hall as people takes their seats.

The bustling fughetto that opens the score is brisk and clean. People around me are leaning over the guardrail to see what I already know. The production is virtually non-existent: a frame of giant shoji screens pushed back and forth for effect, a 70s style disco floor that lights up in mood colors. Another low-budget minimalist vision: no Nagasaki, no cherry blossoms, no hair ornaments or embroidered kimonos. The costumes are pleasant and simple, like a J. Jill catalog. What this kind of production needs is stellar performance. The music is all that matters.

Butterly makes a long entrance from off-stage. The music of her entrance, "Ancora un passo or via," is wraithlike, in high voices from a great distance growing closer. In this production, Cio-Cio San and her wedding party are raised up slowly to the level of the stage on a giant elevator. The more they are exposed, the brighter and closer the voices.

The night before, I could tell from the first notes of Butterfly's entrance that this was not going to be ordinary. Oksana's voice, even offstage, was immediate and lovely. As she stepped forward, she sang the optional high note that is so spellbindingly beautiful when done properly. Oksana was a bit loud on it, but that is a quibble: it is ethereal and spot on gorgeous. Opera at its best.

From the loggione I listened as the "A" cast Butterfly, Micaela Carosi, made the same entrance. The voice was pretty, but harder to hear, and when she opted out of the optional high note, she pretty much lost me for the night. It is one of my favorite moments in all opera... She has a pretty voice with a tremulous vibrato that thrills some and leaves others cold. It doesn't do much for me, but I admired her beautiful legato lines. By the second act she confronted the orchestra's full roar; she was there, but not forward, not soaring over it, as Oksana had done.

There was not much difference, to my ear, between the "A" and "B" Pinkerton, nice voices but underpowered for the part, not spinto enough to be heard in the big moments. Both casts were rather interchangeable, except that the "A" Suzuki made the the flower duet very special.

Micaela Carosi was vocally convincing, her performance impassioned, and I could appreciate her artistry. But she did not knock my socks off, the way Oksana Dyka did. Comparing the two Butterflies is like comparing an ivory-handled dagger to a lightsaber. When Oksana sang either of her big arias, and at all her peak dramatic moments, and in the ensembles, you could clearly hear every nuance of her vocal line. Her tone remained beautiful even when pushed high over the clamoring orchestra. And when the orchestra died down you could hear clearly how her voice was even from the bottom all the way to the floated high d-flat of her entrance.

When she sang, it was opera as it should be; you ceased to worry if she could do it. Trusting her, you could relax and be carried away by what she did. She is not the ideal Butterfly, but she was a brilliant Butterfly. Some day she'll discover her inner Sieglinde, and when she does, I want to be there.

Il crepuscolo degli Dei

2009-05-17T08:05:00.000-07:00

I went to Florence to see the end of the world and I did. I got what I wanted, and then some. As it ended, it was redeemed by love.

What more could you ask for?

It was the Maggio Musicale's controversial Fura dels Baus production of Wagner's Die Gotterdamerung, the closing opera of the Ring of the Niebelungen.

I did not see the three previous parts, so I don't know how the visual imagery and production concepts interlinked, as they must. My impressions are based solely on what I saw and what I know of the Ring of the Niebelungen from previous viewings in a variety of production styles and from thousands of hours of listening accumulated over a lifetime.

It's easy to be disappointed, especially with Wagner. His demands on the singers are inhuman and, on the orchestra, Herculean. To successfully stage a battle with a giant dragon, or portray the frisky subaqueous antics of mermaid-like Rhine Maidens, or depict the Warrior Maidens called valkyries riding through the air on valiant steeds, is never easy. In the closing minutes of Gotterdamerung the world, from Valhalla, the palace of the Gods on high, to the earth below are consumed by flames and flooded over by the Rhine, submerging everything while the orchestra delivers its final redemptive chords. It takes brave and imaginative staging to pull this off.

Fura dels Baus originated as a street theater group in Catalonia in 1979. Since then they have worked in all forms of experimental theater and have a considerable history staging operas. They are in themselves a most interesting phenomenon, and a fascinating (and controversial) choice by the Maggio Musicale festival to design and direct their Ring cycle.

You may have ideas about Wagner and his music, you may not have a clue, but wherever you come from, this production would have made you sit up and take notice.

For example, in the first scene of Act 3, the doomed hero Siegfried encounters those watery vixens, the Rhinemaidens. They try all their wiles to talk Siegfried into relinquishing the ring on his finger, but he will have none of it. They warn him of impending doom but he doesn't listen.

Imagine now, three aquaria suspended above the stage, glass cubes filled with water. There is a Rhinemaiden in each. They flip and charm and, occasionally, fully submerge, posing and beckoning and playfully splashing Siegfried. All the while they are singing enchanting, subtle and fiercely difficult music, making it look easy and fun.

There were moments that didn't work for me. It wasn't enchanted by Gutrune, the Gibichung princess in go-go boots riding an exercycle suspended in a spherical gopher cage. In the fact, the whole Jetson's aesthetic of the Gibichungs left me cold, but Hans Peter Konig was so galvanizing as the evil Hagen, his manipulations of Gunther and Gutrune so chillingly cold-blooded, and his immense barrel-organ bass so overwhelming and insinuating that it took your breath away, reducing everything else to quibbles.

Jennifer Wilson as Brunnhilde gave it everything she had, and if she sometimes came up short it was not for want of trying. She also had to deal with unflattering costumes whilst singing from various contraptions suspended from cranes (see below). There can hardly be a more difficult role to sing and in the most intimately compelling moments she scaled the heights, as in the long scene with her Valkyrie sister Waltraute, and in her final Immolation Scene, her soft, sad "ruhe, ruhe..." was heartfelt and heart-rending. She did not ring out brightly in Act 2 trio, but she was palpable, filled with anger and hurt, pitted against the dark side of The Force.

As for Lance Ryan as Siegfried, it should be enough to say that he sang part of his Act 2 confrontation with Brunnhilde while hanging upside down in gravity boots attached to the keel of the same suspended metal boat that ferried her back captive of his absolute betrayal. He sang that way for several minutes until he was released. Many tenors fail on their feet to sing what he sang upsidedown. He is attractive and physical onstage, and his voice both spoke softly and carried a big stick. He sounded fresher in Act 3 than in Act 1. I don't know if it was because it was the last performance of the run, or because he was particularly inspired, but his Act 3 was sheer bravura, dramatically and vocally. It soared, as if, instead of being about to die, he was just getting started. It made his death all the more startling. He did not appear for curtain calls, but it would not be hard to imagine that he was spent, having given a gigawatt performance.

Siegfried is killed by Hagen at the very moment the magic potion which has blinded him releases him. He has rapturously remembered the forest bird telling him of the sleeping Valkyrie, his voice sweet and ecstatic. Then he remembers his radiant warrior bride, whom he has so horribly betrayed, to the music of her awakening from her long sleep surrounded by the magic fire -- their first meeting. It was devastating emotionally, dramatically, musically. The Funeral March which follows his murder was savage; Zubin Mehta beat it out of the orchestra and they played as if their own families had been murdered and they were fierce and angry and sad while a phalanx of GIbichungs paraded the dead hero's body through the audience.

And then there was the end of the world. Brunnhilde lights Siegfried's funeral pyre, setting heaven and earth on fire. She rides into the fire on the surge of love that conquers time and space and redeems the universe.

Bodies, suspended high, linked acrobatically, writhed in the fire light above the flood and what I saw was the dissolution of the primal DNA, the glue that held everything together, dissolving back into the sea of primal nothingness and already forming the bonds of a new world. So that we did not miss the point, stage hands pushed two rectangular blocks across the front of the stage, upon which was written "L'AMOUR". It was a very 60's touch, but having lived through that, it was resonant in a pleasant way. It was also part of the Circus/Jetsons/60s aesthetic that characterized the production and that annoyed many. Not serious, they said; Star Wars stagecraft. For me, on its own terms, it worked.

It certainly worked for most of the audience, an unusually high number of whom were under 30, hip, alternative, and enchanted; they were still there, dazzled, at the end of the six-hour night filled with music and magic.The metal boat suspended from cranes; Brunnhilde and Gunther inside, Siegfried and Gutrune below. When challenged, he is suspended from the bottom, upside down, in gravity boots. And sings...

Firenze, randomly

2009-05-13T05:39:00.000-07:00

I'm not a good wanderer. I always have a program. I may lapse from the program and meander, waylaid by beauty as Edna Millay put it, but I usually end up where I intended.

So it was accidental that I strolled past the prim Ognisanti Church with the lurid Hercules, all glutes and lats, wrestling a lion in the small square. Inside there were vast treasures, to the extent that I didn't understand why I hadn't set out here purposefully in the first place.

Ghirlandaio's San Gerolamo is in such pristine condition that it looks new; in fact, it looks real. Facing it directly across the nave is Botticelli's Sant'Agostino. Here the Renaissance is in full swing, the composition whirling in orbit around Augustine.

Firenze is the Renaissance city par excellence. At first a Florentine phenomenon, it is here, especially in Santa Croce, that you can see the Renaissance emerge.

It did not burst on the scene fully formed, like Minerva from the head of Zeus. It slowly takes form in the dramatic narrative scenes in Giotto's frescoes. In contrast to the flat and static Byzantine posing that always forms the first room or two of every museum in Italy, the expressions symbolic formulas, the stances frozen and iconographic, the Renaissance flowers first in the faces. Giotto transcended the hieratic Byzantine conventions by breathing life into them; real life. It is one of the great "gear-shifting" moments in history.

Giotto also worked all over Italy -- in Florence, in Padova, in Assisi, in Rome. He spread the seeds the way Johnny Appleseed spread apples. His assistants, his students, his school, his adherents, became the greatest artists of the Renaissance.

The frescoes at Santa Croce are wonderful, no more wonderful than Padova or Assisi, and no less wonderful. They are all supremely beautiful because they express the gamut of human emotion, they are a vast reservoir of shared humanity, capturing the richness of life itself.

What you get to see in abundance in Florence are the intermediate steps between Giotto and Botticelli and Rafaello and Tiziano, Veronese, and Tintoretto.

The basic iconography doesn't change. Giotto's "Presentation of the Virgin" prefigures Tintoretto's and Tiziano's. But increasingly the the faces and hands come to life. Rather than posed, motionless, they are caught in movement, in the middle of something happening. Their expressions are real expressions, realizing something, or thinking something, or about to say something, or terrified of something, or at a moment of transfiguration as in the Annunciations. In Botticelli the movement becomes ballet.

But in Botticelli the beauty of the faces also becomes less real, more idealized. That is the Renaissance in full flower. It departs from the dramatic and personal realism of Giotto and inclines toward the idealization of forms. This was what Ruskin loathed about the Renaissance: the artists replace vivid humanity with idealized proportions, symmetry, facial expressions composed of arcs and angles rather than real human expressions. Yes, they are beautiful. Botticelli out-Veroneses Veronese for sheer sumptuousness. But they do not express the profound simplicity of shared human experience that propel the earlier frescoes.

The "Birth of Venus" room at the Uffizi is always crowded. You can barely see the paintings for the people. Botticelli is, to pre-Modern art, what the Impressionists are to Modern art: easy to love, beautiful, iconic, instantly recognizable. That does not, however, make them the best, regardless of how ravishing they may be. The Lippis in the room before, and Beato Angelico, and, above all, the Santa Croce frescoes and the Massacio and Lippi frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel at the Carmine church, burn with an inner fire that reaches into the soul, that breathes.

The Brancacci chapel is one of the few places I have been that holds its own in the company of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padova and the Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi. The frescoes surround you, transport you to a parallel universe where real people are swept up in the human dramas. They resonate with shared experience of humanity, of mortality and transcendence. Some are bored; some are startled; some sleep. Adam and Eve are tempted on one side and banished from the garden on the other; in between, a world unfolds.

[ SEE FOR YOURSELF]

GOING BAROQUE

2009-05-13T05:34:00.001-07:00

Guido Reni (1575-1642), Davide con la testa di Golia, Uffizi, Firenze

Fenice | Maria Stuarda | Charles and Camilla

2009-05-06T05:30:00.000-07:00

My subscription at La Fenice guarantees that going to the opera is, except for the performance, a routine procedure. No surprises: same night of the week, same vaporetto hop, same streets, same seat. But walking from the Santa Maria del Giglio vaporetto stop last Tuesday evening for Maria Stuarda, I began to notice something was different.

It was the police. We saw the first group behind the opera house: eight of them, four in blue dress uniforms and four in dress fatigues. We crossed the bridge and rounded the rear of Fenice. There were several more groups of them in the narrow calle alongside the building, posted at each door. There must have been thirty more in the small square in front of Fenice, many of them, men and women, in the very fancy black uniforms with red and gold trim.

We went into the bar next door for a glass of prosecco and I asked the bartender what was going on.

He smiled ironically. "Il principe Carlo e sua Camilla." He winked.

That was a strange shock because there had been no preceeding buzz; unlike movie stars, it had been kept very quiet. Richard went in as soon as the doors opened, as usual, and I stayed outside to watch. I assumed that they would come by boat to the rear entrance, and went in to my seat.

I have a great seat. I got the subscription because I was tired of getting stuck in terrible seats. I am in the sixth row of the platea just off the center aisle. When I stood up and turned around, I could see preparations in the red and gold royal box. A very tense offical-looking man had positioned himself in the center aisle and watched the royal box like an eagle, receiving messages from his earplug and giving orders through his mouthpiece. The usual ushers were subordinated tonight to a higher command.

Charles and Camilla entered the royal box in a blaze of flash. All you could see was a swirl of light, silk, phosphorescent platinum hair, brilliant smiles; a pause; a wave; and the houselights went down.

It was a tough act to follow, and the singers demonstrated a little extra edge, which worked both for them (the two Queens) and against them (their Leicester, the tenor).

This production is shared by Teatro Verdi in Trieste, San Carlo in Naples, Massimo in Palermo . Sharing simple productions is a way of dealing with slashed subsidies. The unit set, modular and easily transportable, was a large, steeply raked maze. Navigating the maze comprised most of the stage action. Yes, it is symbolic; but it is also a cheap and unimaginative solution to the budget problem. It was lit various colors as the scenes progressed, but ended up being nothing more than an obstacle course for the singers. Fortunately, they were unhampered by cumbersome period costumes; instead, the costumes were minimalist simple, stylishly modern, in single colors with very Venetian jewel-tone sheens.

Sonia Ganassi, Elizabetta, is five months pregnant and got off to a rocky start, forced to stagger through the maze as if she were struggling for breath to sing all that complicated fioritura. Over the evening she became more and more dramatically convincing, her tone more even and commanding.

The same was true of Fiorenza Cedolins as Maria Stuarda. She sounded forced at the top, not as bright and easy as the high coloratura should have sounded. It is her first foray into this role, in want of some tuning. Below the stratosphere she was vocally secure and dramatically compelling.

Once again the problem was with the tenor. Fenice has been parading seriously inadequate voices in the tenor department. Roméo in March, both casts, was abysmal (Jonas Kaufmann was originally to have sung it, but dropped out early). Jose Bros was basically unacceptable. He often had trouble producing sounds, any sounds, let alone the music he was supposed to be singing. There were stretches where his tight nasal tenor was mellifluous, but not many. He was easily covered by the orchestra and the two women, but what are those duets and ensembles without the tenor? Not much, even though the girls sang like their lives depended on it. Real sparks flew between the two Queens, and that was when the opera happened.

After the interval the houselights dimmed to half-intensity, but not all the way. The security man was in the aisle listening and talking. It became apparent to the audience that they were waiting for the Royals to return to their box. The Italian women behind me (regulars) were muttering "get on with it" loudly.

At the end, after the various curtain calls, the audience turned to watch the Royals leave the Royal box. Their presence had influenced everything about the evening: the audience, the musicians, the staff. It was not another night at the opera. It was the night Charles and Camilla came to La Fenice. They smiled and waved. The audience applauded them warmly. They had come to Venice to go to the opera. That scored points.

[On the right is Albert's friend Luciano, who squired them around the house because he was considered the most knowledgeable person on the history and lore of La Fenice.]

Over the weekend Sir R. and Lady F. stayed our b&b. They had come to Venice for the weekend to attend a party at Villa Malcontenta, and Lady F. had gotten a tickets to the opera. I told them how Charles and Camilla had been there when I went.

"Oh, yes, I knew they were here," she said. "He loves opera."

I told them what I thought of the performance and the production. The next morning I chatted with them at breakfast.

"Enjoy the opera?" I asked.

"Smashing," he said. "But not one word of it is true, historically. Elizabeth and Mary never met."

"Operatic license, Italian style."

"We thought the two sopranos were marvellous, really. The tenor was the weak link. Although F. thought the soprano's high notes were a little off."

I was glad that it wasn't just me; that the tenor didn't cut the mustard for any one (his dutiful applause was lackluster; both sopranos got healthy ovations, as did, as always, the orchestra).

"I am always amazed that it is so difficult to find a good tenor, especially here, in Italy," I said to him.

"It's difficult to find a good tenor anywhere," he said. "The most difficult voice to fill; there are plenty of good sopranos and baritones and basses to choose from. But good tenors... they're hard to find."

You have to wonder why.

Sushi at Skyline Bar

2009-04-27T13:47:00.001-07:00

Molino Stucky Hilton

I was really stoked!

The posters are up in vaporetto stops all over town:

SUSHI AT SKYLINE
Every Friday at 7.30pm.
Presented by Chef Aquira

I love sushi and had never been to the Skyline Bar. I couldn't wait to go. Friday at 7:30 pm.

But my work schedule is erratic and it took three weeks before I could finally arrange to meet Robin at the Zattere vaporetto stop at 7-15.

We took the No. 2 across the Giudecca Canal and got off at the Palanca stop for a pleasant stroll up Giudecca to the hotel. A gallery poster caught Robin's eye and she snapped it with her camera/phone so she wouldn't forget it. The dusk was still light and rosy, the air moist and fragrant.

Passing Fortuny we laughed about what a small world Venice is. A good friend of Robin's is a good friend of the chap who helped Richard at Fortuny when I went with him last week. She also confirmed that yes, there is a swimming pool behind Countess Gozzi's palazzina, "dug beneath the canal line to boot."

The Molino Stucky was a flour mill; it is massive, neo-Gothic, and would look at home in Berlin or Chicago. But at least the exterior has character. The interior of the hotel has none. Nor does it have a sense of place. It could be anywhere; it would be equally as bland and unrevealing wherever it was. I stopped to ask the Concierge how to get to the bar but she was too busy on the phone to answer a question, as was the girl who was doing nothing nearby.

Richard had warned me. He had gone to the Skyline Bar for a drink one evening and sat for twenty minutes without anyone serving him. He swore never to return.

We spotted the elevator and hit 8 for the bar. What we stepped out into was something else. To the west, the sun was setting over the industrial skyline of Marghera. To the east, Venice glittered in the pink and golden light. The view is stunning wherever you look.

We went from the west terrace through the bar to the east terrace. More drinkers, more gawkers. No sushi in sight.

I walked over to the empty host station and a passing waiter stopped.

"Are you doing sushi tonight?" I asked.

He looked confused.

"I saw the posters," I said. "Sushi on Fridays at 7:30."

"No," he said. "Not tonight."

The posters have been up for weeks.

"When should we come back for sushi?" I asked.

He smiled helpfully.

"Next year," he said. "I think maybe next year for sushi."

It was not April Fool's Day, but it is only April. A long wait.

We laughed over surprisingly good big 11 euro spritz al aperols with toast rounds, toppings and fat green olives. How could you do anything but laugh. It was so perfectly Venetian.

[ SEE FOR YOURSELF]

QUESTURA: PART III

2009-04-27T11:59:00.000-07:00

Part II was a complete misfire. On the misguided assumption that since they were open I could go and drop off the missing photocopy (see Questura Hell), I returned the following afternoon.

The Questura opens at 3pm one afternoon a week. The line was already forming at 12:30. Putting into practice what I had learned (assume nothing), I walked over to a guard and asked if I had to wait in line and get a number to drop off my document. "Yes," he said, "I would. But I couldn't do that today. I would have to come back tomorrow. That particular task could be done in the morning only. I reiterated that all I needed to do was drop off the document. He looked at me like I was stupid. In the morning, he said. You can do that in the morning.

The following morning I woke up at 4-30, hoping to get a minor jump on the line, and was on the 5-43 vaporetto and the 6-20 bus. The sky was dark with clouds, and a significant line was already forming by the time I arrived at 6-40. The window wouldn't open until 8-30.

It was the kind of line that got bigger both in front of you and behind you. A particularly verbal signora, seemingly not a straniera to judge from her idiomatic Italian, yelled at people slipping into the front of the line. She never won, but she kept it up and I admired her for it.

The pedestrian gate was closed and thus the canopied area behind it. The line formed in the open street. When the downpour started the umbrellas starting popping up, sending the line into spasms. It was empty under the canopy while people got drenched outside. Several smartly-uniformed officers watched from inside.

The gate didn't open, but there was a sudden mad surge in the crowd. The automated car gates swung open, and people ran for the canopy. Wherever you were in line, you weren't anymore. Squatters defiantly staked their new positions. Most of the people in front of me had been behind me. It was perfect chaos.

By the time the numbers began to be handed out, the line was surlier and tighter and pushier than Tuesday, which I didn't think possible. You literally couldn't move your arms and had no control over your own movement. When I got to the window I showed the officer my form. He told me to give it to him. I was so dazed I didn't get what he was saying until the lady who, seconds before had been pushing me like steamroller to get in front of me, said in slow Russian-inflected Italian, "lascia il foglio." Leave it. "No numero?" I asked. The officer shook his head. "My colleague will call your name."

Somewhere near 10 am the clerk who had processed me 48 hours earlier came out from behind the red door with a sheaf of papers. He called out names, mine among them, and we followed him down another corridor where he disappeared into another office with glass cages like a shabby bank. The door slammed behind him. From his glass cage he shouted someone's name through the door when it opened for someone else going out. A woman waved her arm, entered, and the door slammed behind her. When she left, he shouted another name through the open door before it slammed shut loudly. And so on. No one in the corridor could hear or understand him so a good-natured kid standing by the door his best to repeat the names loudly.

He called my name and I walked up to his window. He didn't ask to see my passport, or read my fingerprints, or do anything that would have required my physical presence. He asked for the document. I gave it to him, he looked at it, smiled, and said "A posto." It's fine.

That was it. I could go. It was for that I waited in line in a rainstorm. I could have dropped it off into a convenient slot, handed it to any number of guards out front, or simply faxed it. But no. I couldn't. I had to be inconvenienced to the max for no reason, for its own sake.

Why I Love JG Ballard

2009-04-27T11:08:00.000-07:00

Max Ernst, The Whole City, 1935

When I was young Ballard not only showed me consistently perfect writing, but taught me lessons that no one else had and some that no one else ever would, certainly not half so well. Although I never knew him he was a friend, and although we never spoke, he was a mentor. He helped set the bar for what good writing is.

Every writing class addresses the ticking clock, the mainspring of suspense. It is the cataclysm we know will happen in 25 hours unless we can cripple the detonator. The strict regularity of the clock is the inflexible rhythm of all inevitability. Ballard’s clocks are never straightforward. They can tick backwards and turn inward on themselves; his characters are the dials upon which they register.

Ballard showed me that no wall divides dreaming and waking; they mutually interpenetrate. With his calm, avuncular voice he said “Given: your nightmare is reality. Task: Experience your nightmare’s nightmare." He carefully composes symbolic landscapes to reveal what we cannot otherwise see, the mystery behind the veil. Terminal Beach is the landscape of the late twentieth century.

And his meticulously detailed scientific objectivity gives wing to a soaring romanticism. When flowers sing it is with the passionate intensity of Maria Callas. A slowly drowning world, where giant lizards stare menacingly from the terraces of submerged skyscrapers, is a lurid surrealist jungle. The Wind From Nowhere comes from nowhere. The Concrete Island, in the center of London, is worse than Robinson Cruesoe’s because it is encircled not by a blank and endless sea, but by the blind quotidian world. The limits of rationality can be reached and passed, and then the most accurate description of reality reads like a nightmare or an ecstatic vision. That was where Ballard lived.

He was the scientist poet of ultimate reality.

My Own Private Venice

Forwarding address

Ciao, Venezia

Paradise Regained

TORINO | PETER GRIMES | MOVIE MUSEUM

Munich Rocks!

Caravaggio. Lotto. Ribera

Double Whammy

Mindf**k in Castelfranco Veneto

Venetian Efficiency | Venetian Sublime

How I Remember It

The Stones of Assisi (and Urbino)

Nightscapes, Castello

Villa Pisani | Xanadu on the Brenta

Boka Bence, Lute Player

Venice at Night

Rubelli | In a word, sumptuous

Rainy day, San Marco

Happy Halloween

Two hours at the Doge's Palace

Venice Marathon

Venice at Night

Handel Rocks Malibran

Magic Numbers

Venice, Autumn, Night

Night thoughts

A sense of scale

Changing seasons

Roman Bath as Renaissance Church

Proust was wrong

Piero il magnifico

Is it real or did you make it up?

The Waste Land

Biennale: Lithuanian Pavillion, East-West Divan

Lightning Strikes Twice

Fenice | La Traviata

Autumn flowerboxes

A day in the life

Sic transit gloria mundi

Where Am I?

Three Guys on a Fence

Where Am I?

Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!

Fortuna dancing

Ferragosto

An Open Letter to John Pull

And the winner is...

John Wesley Retrospective

The Most Beautiful Song in the World

Something Strange Happened Here

Gli uccelli cantono nel giardino

Festa del Redentore 2009

Punta della Dogana ROCKS

Bringing the outside in

San Gimignano | Towers and Walls

Florence | Verdi Requiem

A Monday morning

Gotterdammerung at La Fenice

San Gimignano | The medieval laundromat

San Gimignano: Theme Park with Towers

IT WASN'T THE FIRST CAMPING TRIP AND IT WASN'T THE LAST, BUT IT WAS DEFINITELY ONE FOR THE BOOKS.

Venezia / Catalunya 2009

What I Am Thankful For Today

Men in Uniform

Two Butterflies

Il crepuscolo degli Dei

Firenze, randomly

GOING BAROQUE

Fenice | Maria Stuarda | Charles and Camilla

Sushi at Skyline Bar

QUESTURA: PART III

Why I Love JG Ballard

IT WASN'T THE FIRST CAMPING TRIP AND IT
WASN'T THE LAST, BUT IT WAS DEFINITELY ONE FOR THE BOOKS.