It’s not the third day, it’s the third entry. My intention was to write daily, but I find my powers of comprehension and articulation diluted in an imprecise mix of everything: sight, sound, smell and the fatigue of incorporating it all. This is not a new theme, but finding one has proven difficult. The things I do yield to the things I feel, and the retelling of it becomes all tone and no content. I blame my memory.
So I have a notebook, and sometimes I write in it. Here are a couple of the last excerpts.
The city is big, teeming, growing, and the pain of that growth smells. The stench is not optimistic. It originates in the exhaustion of the civil body as it overgrows itself. The trash, the dust of demolition, the over-quick entropy of poor workmanship.
I like that I haven’t seen many tourist sites here. I had my fill of them from my travels in Europe. They generally dissatisfy me because they offer little insight into present-day society or its tone and personality. And I guess I’m no historian.
It turns out that I haven’t been exposed to much intimate contact with Chinese people because nearly all of Adam’s friends are expats. It’s difficult to break into Chinese circles because foreigners carry their difference around on their faces and in the color of their hair, eyes, and skin. Marginalization based on physiognomy. Novel. People stare at Adam and me as if we’re novelties. The novelty here is based not on reputation as a westerner, as in Russia/Ukraine, but on sight. It gives me a sense of invisibility because I have the authoritative mix of anonymity and novelty that allows me to remain a superficial interest for natives who will excuse whatever excesses I exhibit as simple Western decadence.
For example, Adam and I decided to have our chests waxed to rid ourselves of that ubiquitous Western bush, the simultaneous sign of manhood and aging. The cost for deforestation per chest: $12. The woman performing the waxing said she’d never seen such abundant chest hair before and as a result made this comment: “I’m just doing this by ear.” In retrospect, I can’t blame her inexperience with foreign chests for the excruciating pain, but at the time I thought she must have been doing something wrong, otherwise why would I volunteer and pay (a fantastic, almost self-justifying price) for that masochistic rite? As Adam put it, “second to second the waxing was the most pain I’ve ever experienced.” And he’s passed a kidney stone. Now my chest is covered in red, pussy pustules where a monument to Western genetics once stood, arrogant and unperturbed. All of it—the pain, the yells, the hand squeezing, the deep breaths, the nervous laughter, the temporary celebrity, the weak thumbs ups, the after-sting—was way too much fun.
2006.08.14
14 August 2006
09 August 2006
The Third Day, Beijing, or Rest and Realization
The first title of this entry somehow translated my holiday into a sentencing, as if at the end of it there were nothing but the inevitable state of things, the quotidian, and the present in its shadow as a mere comedy brought of will and force and held up unnaturally, as if I managed by some dark magic to suspend the requirements of long-term life in the momentary rush of this new world. Holiday is, however, in no way carefree, as Mom and I learned in Italy. It requires a great deal of energy not only for the management of travel logistics but also for the assimilation of the novel, to which nearly everything applies. So the inevitability of the routine becomes a promise of the familiar that, at the moment, offers the promise of a certain relief.
This is how I feel about Beijing, though a resident protects me. I’m frightened to go outside alone without the ability to navigate the city or read the names of stores, streets, and landmarks. I may imagine a solo expedition into the city, though, and on these fictive sallies I find the odd and old fact of adaptation. Where I can’t read the name of a store, the merchandise sitting in its window betrays the secret hidden in the signs. That is, the products in a store function as the store’s signifier instead of as its signified. In this sense the value of the product itself overwhelms the quality and attraction of its branding, and what I see through the store windows becomes the name of the store itself: I see aisles of food, I think market; I see clothes, I think clothier; I see gadgets, I think electronics. But how to choose products, or how to pay, or even how to look at the attendant?
I took some lessons from Adam, a master of the art of negotiation on any continent, oriental or occidental. Successful negotiation—especially where big outdoor and indoor markets are made up of innumerable small entrepreneurs—is not just a matter of indifference, feigned or otherwise, toward the product, but instead is a function of love for the process itself. It is then, when the artificial smile, the dismissive hand gesture, the scowl and the whine, the affected aggravation, the red herring, the dodge and wheedle, the flattering word and, of course, the indifference, authentic or otherwise, that acquisition of the product itself becomes extraneous to the success of the effort. For the love of the game, art for art’s sake, lift up your eyes and rejoice, for the prodigal son has returned, suntanned, penniless, and full of stories.
So I rely on Adam, whose language and experience and nineteenth-storey apartment buffer me from the hostility of this foreignness and allow these two weeks to reconcile rest and bewilderment. No maps, no tickets, no tourists, no plotting, no worrying, no feelings of superfluity. Though I still feel stupidity when I can’t even greet someone to whom Adam introduces me, can’t say hello. So I smile a lot and nod, though such gestures belong in Japan, and I imbue the tone of my voice with cheerfulness and sincerity and complicity.
Such as at the massage parlor tonight, where a young woman shampooed my hair, massaged pressure points on my face and neck, kneaded my shoulders and arms, rubbed my hands and fingers, and pounded my upper back with her hands cupped one inside the other to deflect the full force of her short-armed swings. She was a small woman, a young woman, capable of a great deal of force that left my upper body, and by association my legs, loose and pliant. I wanted to carry on a conversation with her as Adam did with his masseuse, but I could only gesture, and at that only subtly, out of embarrassment. When she asked me to take off my glasses I just nodded and looked away. I thought she’d asked if I wanted Pantene. She repeated the request with a gesture indicating my glasses, and I smiled and looked away, embarrassed. The repeated gesture, the repeated emotion.
2006.08.09
This is how I feel about Beijing, though a resident protects me. I’m frightened to go outside alone without the ability to navigate the city or read the names of stores, streets, and landmarks. I may imagine a solo expedition into the city, though, and on these fictive sallies I find the odd and old fact of adaptation. Where I can’t read the name of a store, the merchandise sitting in its window betrays the secret hidden in the signs. That is, the products in a store function as the store’s signifier instead of as its signified. In this sense the value of the product itself overwhelms the quality and attraction of its branding, and what I see through the store windows becomes the name of the store itself: I see aisles of food, I think market; I see clothes, I think clothier; I see gadgets, I think electronics. But how to choose products, or how to pay, or even how to look at the attendant?
I took some lessons from Adam, a master of the art of negotiation on any continent, oriental or occidental. Successful negotiation—especially where big outdoor and indoor markets are made up of innumerable small entrepreneurs—is not just a matter of indifference, feigned or otherwise, toward the product, but instead is a function of love for the process itself. It is then, when the artificial smile, the dismissive hand gesture, the scowl and the whine, the affected aggravation, the red herring, the dodge and wheedle, the flattering word and, of course, the indifference, authentic or otherwise, that acquisition of the product itself becomes extraneous to the success of the effort. For the love of the game, art for art’s sake, lift up your eyes and rejoice, for the prodigal son has returned, suntanned, penniless, and full of stories.
So I rely on Adam, whose language and experience and nineteenth-storey apartment buffer me from the hostility of this foreignness and allow these two weeks to reconcile rest and bewilderment. No maps, no tickets, no tourists, no plotting, no worrying, no feelings of superfluity. Though I still feel stupidity when I can’t even greet someone to whom Adam introduces me, can’t say hello. So I smile a lot and nod, though such gestures belong in Japan, and I imbue the tone of my voice with cheerfulness and sincerity and complicity.
Such as at the massage parlor tonight, where a young woman shampooed my hair, massaged pressure points on my face and neck, kneaded my shoulders and arms, rubbed my hands and fingers, and pounded my upper back with her hands cupped one inside the other to deflect the full force of her short-armed swings. She was a small woman, a young woman, capable of a great deal of force that left my upper body, and by association my legs, loose and pliant. I wanted to carry on a conversation with her as Adam did with his masseuse, but I could only gesture, and at that only subtly, out of embarrassment. When she asked me to take off my glasses I just nodded and looked away. I thought she’d asked if I wanted Pantene. She repeated the request with a gesture indicating my glasses, and I smiled and looked away, embarrassed. The repeated gesture, the repeated emotion.
2006.08.09
08 August 2006
Beijing 1
Lovely smog here in Beijing, and a lovely odor, that mix of sweat, heat, garbage, and fried food. In the haze of jet lag and exhaustion the memory of my initiatory foray into the city yields little more than the odor of it. It’s not an unfamiliar smell, peculiar to the air of development. In my experience it is exactly this stale odor that accompanies the clash of construction and decay. Everywhere there are big buildings going up, the twenty-story kind, mostly apartments where I am, and old buildings going down to make room for the new ones and the new international face of the Chinese capital. Many of the construction and destruction workers come from the country and, according to Adam, work until the project is done, at which time they receive a paycheck. They are young and old, some conspicuously skinny, others more robust, all the ones I’ve seen with a certain look that differs from the look of passersby, who are of all types, their range equally dichotic. Skirts and suits and the fashionable mixed among the indigent walking barefoot and riding rusted bicycles from some time more coincident with the idylls of 1950s America.
These depictions are easy and incomplete, as first impressions always are, and so I look forward to spending a week and a half here with a guide as experienced in the language and the culture as Adam. I’m spending today inside to recover from travel and the whir of multiple time zones. I stayed up all day yesterday to shock my body into Beijing time, but my body struck back by sleeping until one o’clock. When I woke up I had the strange sensation that my limbs were attached only tenuously, and that any quick movement might sever their association with my body. So I lay for some time, vaguely afraid of that prospect, drifting in and out of sleep, until my consciousness coalesced and consistent feeling returned to my body. I’ll spend the remainder of the day convalescing, I suspect, and catching up with emails and the business of maintaining the contiguity of past and present to make it all fit under the tiny word “life.”
In the meantime, a shout-out to the Risk Management department of the Credit Union, which provided me upon my departure with a bag of goodies, including the expired instant oatmeal and the unexpirable soup powder that I just had for lunch.
2006.08.08
These depictions are easy and incomplete, as first impressions always are, and so I look forward to spending a week and a half here with a guide as experienced in the language and the culture as Adam. I’m spending today inside to recover from travel and the whir of multiple time zones. I stayed up all day yesterday to shock my body into Beijing time, but my body struck back by sleeping until one o’clock. When I woke up I had the strange sensation that my limbs were attached only tenuously, and that any quick movement might sever their association with my body. So I lay for some time, vaguely afraid of that prospect, drifting in and out of sleep, until my consciousness coalesced and consistent feeling returned to my body. I’ll spend the remainder of the day convalescing, I suspect, and catching up with emails and the business of maintaining the contiguity of past and present to make it all fit under the tiny word “life.”
In the meantime, a shout-out to the Risk Management department of the Credit Union, which provided me upon my departure with a bag of goodies, including the expired instant oatmeal and the unexpirable soup powder that I just had for lunch.
2006.08.08
07 August 2006
The Potteries, Birmingham, and the Hamlets
We took the long way to Birmingham and various regions of Neal’s mission. We caught a plane from Milan to Liverpool, where we rented a convertible too small for the three of us with luggage, but just right for a vacationer’s ethos, that footloose and fancy freedom that Fozzy made a career singing about.
After a couple of abortive rounds about the parking lot, a little coaching from Neal, and some pop-psychological pep talk (you can do it, you’re good enough, smart enough), I took us and our automatic Saab convertible onto British roads. My job was to drive; Neal’s was to tell me where to drive; Mom’s was to ignore the fact that I’d never driven on the left side of the road and that Neal didn’t really know where he was going. Together, with the help of the Big Atlas of British Roads, we got it more or less right on and in relatively no time found ourselves cruising alongside the rolling hills of rural England with our sights trained on Stoke-on-Trent and the Potteries.
Neal and Mom know more about the Potteries than I, and it is from them that I learned what little I know. Forefather Edward Henry Rhead left here in 1856 at five years of age with his parents to cross the Atlantic and join up with the Latter-day Saints in the States. The local accent in the Potteries, I was told, which is so unique to the region, in large part developed as a function of noise pollution, one of the byproducts of making and firing pottery. In consequence the quieter, shyer vowels got dropped, and the result: Neal had to do some translation work for the poor Yankees he was toting around England with him.
A local bum attempted to instruct us on how to use the self-cleaning public toilet. Neal made the instructions meaningful by essentially repeating them verbatim, and Mom, urged by biological exigency, dropped her tuppence into the slot of the green silo, entered, and turned just in time to see the door slide automatically to shut her in and us out. She looked as if she knew this was no self-cleaning public toilet but the portal to some other world on which there was no Saab convertible, no Nathan to drive it, and no Neal to translate English into American. Neal took it all in stride, no doubt having been in the portal himself in times past, but I credited Mom with more courage than I myself could claim, and by the time she’d emerged I’d gained a temporary stay against the same biological exigency.
We made Birmingham a brief stop: we took the time only of an afternoon to walk about the city center—a pedestrian’s dream—eat lunch on a bench overlooking real teenage British hoodlums, and catch a commercial art museum just before closing. Neal, the artist, was both pleased and perplexed by the museum’s offerings. It exhibited work from famous names, including Picasso, but had made at least one mistake in describing the type of art (lithograph or etching?) and even misattributed a piece. But Neal’s biggest trouble was Mom and I: the undereducated, the laypeople.
Neal sees a painting by Damien Hurst: it’s a largish canvas painted in symmetrical, polka dots of different colors. Mom says, “What’s so important about this? Why is this so valuable?” Neal says, “What’s so unimportant about it? Do you think you could do it?” Mom says, “Sure.” Neal says, “How would you do it?” Mom says, “I don’t know, get some construction paper, make circles, paste them to a poster board.”
Later in the week, in Huntingdon, Mom gets this gleam in her eye. It’s more than a bright idea; it’s a devious one. The three of us are walking down the pedestrian section of the town toward evening when Mom lets out this elated sound, as if she’s finally clapped a pesky mosquito between her hands. We look and follow her pointed finger through a shop window to a collection of wrapping papers. Among the vertical tubes is a roll of large polka dots of varying colors on a white background. The implication is clear: she has found her replica of Hurst, and if the shop were only open she could wrap every present in Hurst this Christmas, and for a very fair price at that.
Huntingdon: the little hamlet next to St. Ives, the little hamlet. The word “hamlet” sounds diminutive and inaccurate, but its connotation does more to describe these quaint, quiet, noncontiguous towns in otherwise rural England than the word “town” itself does. And, besides, I was enchanted. Huntingdon is the kind of place you feel lucky to stumble onto. St. Ives even more so. The quality of the quiet in these two towns is such that a wedge of swans battling over the remainder of Neal’s beef kabob was both the nosiest and most active event the town had to offer. The sun set over the water the canal and the medieval bridge spanning it and tempered everything, even the remaining sounds, and we sat there on a bench alongside the canal, three travelers for a moment painted into a harmonious, panoramic standstill.
If Huntingdon felt pastoral, Birmingham seemed grim, glum, and real. There were no tourists, except us, and so the city center became a place where people came, repeatedly, to enact the rituals of living: shopping, courting, picnicking, rendezvousing and commuting. We suspected nothing of this reality in London, among the countless tourists and the veneer of the capital, and since we liked Huntingdon so much, we decided to stay on at the historic George hotel for thirty pounds per each of three individual rooms. At night we’d part for our quarters with wishes of sweet dreams; in the morning we’d knock on each other’s door to coordinate for a descent to breakfast. Here we were rather unlike tourists, but rather more like borders in a new city, brought together by the proximity of our three doors along a hallway that slanted and creaked with the feeling of a potent, friendly haunting.
We spent as little of the morning of our last full day of the joint trip at another full, greasy English breakfast among other patrons of the hotel restaurant. Shortly afterward, Neal made his only solo flight in the car to chauffeur himself and Mom to church. I stayed back to work on my thesis, which still haunted me from abroad. I walked about to find a hint of Internet access somewhere in Huntingdon only to convince myself that the town has figured out a way, in all its quaintness, to circumvent the computer revolution. I found a supermarket instead, picked up the makings for a fresh salad—what Mom longed for most during all our travels—a Tupperware bowl, plastic utensils, and a whole pineapple to welcome Mom and Neal home with a meal one-third the price and twice the freshness of everything else we’d found abroad.
After the salad, Mom took to carving the pineapple with the two-inch blade of a pocketknife and simultaneously started a conversation on impressions of our travels. She asks Neal first, “Name a couple of events or aspects of your experience that stand out.” He mentions learning to appreciate his family more, making good professional contacts and good art; learning again that he wants to live where he can walk places. I talk of liking the feeling of incongruity when the modern meets the ancient, e.g. photographing the Roman Forum or the Coliseum. Mom talks of the concerts we attended and, despite the heat in the buildings or the discomfort of sitting on hard benches, the beauty of the performances (Vivaldi, Kreisler, Beethoven, Debussy, Chopin, Mendelssohn) and the virtuosity of the players.
And how surreal it was for her to sit with her two baby boys, grown into these foreign adult bodies, in these foreign places.
When we parted at Heathrow airport, we had little to say that our smiles and our tears could not adequately convey. And then they went one way and I went another, they to British Air, I to Turkish Air. And the rest is history.
08.07.2006
P.S. Two days later official at Heathrow airport discovered liquid explosives in baggage, canceled numerous flights, especially to the States, and forbade the carrying of any liquid or paste into the cabin of the airplane.
After a couple of abortive rounds about the parking lot, a little coaching from Neal, and some pop-psychological pep talk (you can do it, you’re good enough, smart enough), I took us and our automatic Saab convertible onto British roads. My job was to drive; Neal’s was to tell me where to drive; Mom’s was to ignore the fact that I’d never driven on the left side of the road and that Neal didn’t really know where he was going. Together, with the help of the Big Atlas of British Roads, we got it more or less right on and in relatively no time found ourselves cruising alongside the rolling hills of rural England with our sights trained on Stoke-on-Trent and the Potteries.
Neal and Mom know more about the Potteries than I, and it is from them that I learned what little I know. Forefather Edward Henry Rhead left here in 1856 at five years of age with his parents to cross the Atlantic and join up with the Latter-day Saints in the States. The local accent in the Potteries, I was told, which is so unique to the region, in large part developed as a function of noise pollution, one of the byproducts of making and firing pottery. In consequence the quieter, shyer vowels got dropped, and the result: Neal had to do some translation work for the poor Yankees he was toting around England with him.
A local bum attempted to instruct us on how to use the self-cleaning public toilet. Neal made the instructions meaningful by essentially repeating them verbatim, and Mom, urged by biological exigency, dropped her tuppence into the slot of the green silo, entered, and turned just in time to see the door slide automatically to shut her in and us out. She looked as if she knew this was no self-cleaning public toilet but the portal to some other world on which there was no Saab convertible, no Nathan to drive it, and no Neal to translate English into American. Neal took it all in stride, no doubt having been in the portal himself in times past, but I credited Mom with more courage than I myself could claim, and by the time she’d emerged I’d gained a temporary stay against the same biological exigency.
We made Birmingham a brief stop: we took the time only of an afternoon to walk about the city center—a pedestrian’s dream—eat lunch on a bench overlooking real teenage British hoodlums, and catch a commercial art museum just before closing. Neal, the artist, was both pleased and perplexed by the museum’s offerings. It exhibited work from famous names, including Picasso, but had made at least one mistake in describing the type of art (lithograph or etching?) and even misattributed a piece. But Neal’s biggest trouble was Mom and I: the undereducated, the laypeople.
Neal sees a painting by Damien Hurst: it’s a largish canvas painted in symmetrical, polka dots of different colors. Mom says, “What’s so important about this? Why is this so valuable?” Neal says, “What’s so unimportant about it? Do you think you could do it?” Mom says, “Sure.” Neal says, “How would you do it?” Mom says, “I don’t know, get some construction paper, make circles, paste them to a poster board.”
Later in the week, in Huntingdon, Mom gets this gleam in her eye. It’s more than a bright idea; it’s a devious one. The three of us are walking down the pedestrian section of the town toward evening when Mom lets out this elated sound, as if she’s finally clapped a pesky mosquito between her hands. We look and follow her pointed finger through a shop window to a collection of wrapping papers. Among the vertical tubes is a roll of large polka dots of varying colors on a white background. The implication is clear: she has found her replica of Hurst, and if the shop were only open she could wrap every present in Hurst this Christmas, and for a very fair price at that.
Huntingdon: the little hamlet next to St. Ives, the little hamlet. The word “hamlet” sounds diminutive and inaccurate, but its connotation does more to describe these quaint, quiet, noncontiguous towns in otherwise rural England than the word “town” itself does. And, besides, I was enchanted. Huntingdon is the kind of place you feel lucky to stumble onto. St. Ives even more so. The quality of the quiet in these two towns is such that a wedge of swans battling over the remainder of Neal’s beef kabob was both the nosiest and most active event the town had to offer. The sun set over the water the canal and the medieval bridge spanning it and tempered everything, even the remaining sounds, and we sat there on a bench alongside the canal, three travelers for a moment painted into a harmonious, panoramic standstill.
If Huntingdon felt pastoral, Birmingham seemed grim, glum, and real. There were no tourists, except us, and so the city center became a place where people came, repeatedly, to enact the rituals of living: shopping, courting, picnicking, rendezvousing and commuting. We suspected nothing of this reality in London, among the countless tourists and the veneer of the capital, and since we liked Huntingdon so much, we decided to stay on at the historic George hotel for thirty pounds per each of three individual rooms. At night we’d part for our quarters with wishes of sweet dreams; in the morning we’d knock on each other’s door to coordinate for a descent to breakfast. Here we were rather unlike tourists, but rather more like borders in a new city, brought together by the proximity of our three doors along a hallway that slanted and creaked with the feeling of a potent, friendly haunting.
We spent as little of the morning of our last full day of the joint trip at another full, greasy English breakfast among other patrons of the hotel restaurant. Shortly afterward, Neal made his only solo flight in the car to chauffeur himself and Mom to church. I stayed back to work on my thesis, which still haunted me from abroad. I walked about to find a hint of Internet access somewhere in Huntingdon only to convince myself that the town has figured out a way, in all its quaintness, to circumvent the computer revolution. I found a supermarket instead, picked up the makings for a fresh salad—what Mom longed for most during all our travels—a Tupperware bowl, plastic utensils, and a whole pineapple to welcome Mom and Neal home with a meal one-third the price and twice the freshness of everything else we’d found abroad.
After the salad, Mom took to carving the pineapple with the two-inch blade of a pocketknife and simultaneously started a conversation on impressions of our travels. She asks Neal first, “Name a couple of events or aspects of your experience that stand out.” He mentions learning to appreciate his family more, making good professional contacts and good art; learning again that he wants to live where he can walk places. I talk of liking the feeling of incongruity when the modern meets the ancient, e.g. photographing the Roman Forum or the Coliseum. Mom talks of the concerts we attended and, despite the heat in the buildings or the discomfort of sitting on hard benches, the beauty of the performances (Vivaldi, Kreisler, Beethoven, Debussy, Chopin, Mendelssohn) and the virtuosity of the players.
And how surreal it was for her to sit with her two baby boys, grown into these foreign adult bodies, in these foreign places.
When we parted at Heathrow airport, we had little to say that our smiles and our tears could not adequately convey. And then they went one way and I went another, they to British Air, I to Turkish Air. And the rest is history.
08.07.2006
P.S. Two days later official at Heathrow airport discovered liquid explosives in baggage, canceled numerous flights, especially to the States, and forbade the carrying of any liquid or paste into the cabin of the airplane.
04 August 2006
To Liverpool, with Homage to Zurich
You’re wondering, why Liverpool? Its airport makes “why Liverpool?” abundantly clear in broad murals: The Beatles were born here, all four of the bright boys. But our reason was simpler, quieter, more practical, less star-struck, hardly musical. Ryan Air with its cheap plane tickets, and a proximal starting block for everything we wanted to see on a southerly itinerary through the Island, ending at Heathrow airport and including, in chronological order, the Potteries (Stoke-on-Trent), Birmingham, Huntingdon and St. Ives, all to the accompaniment of those rolling hills, that misted countryside. It was almost exactly what you’d expect from an American’s film-based perspective of the mother country. In this way England to me is much like Switzerland upon first glance: both countries fit their codified, maybe branded, international images.
Which reminds me, I skipped Switzerland, our first stop, in my writings. I want Switzerland and Sarah--my niece, Mom’s granddaughter and the facilitator of our two, let’s say idyllic, days in Zürich--to know that the oversight was neither intentional nor unintentional but, rather, natural. That is to say my experience in Switzerland was so flawless, relaxing, and easy from a logistical point of view (you might say everything went like clockwork) that it hardly shares the emotional tone of the trip it began. Being something like a dream, Zürich faded into the indelible smile I woke up with in the morning as the train approached Venice.
I recall this dream much in the way one recalls dreams, in fragments of the quotidian overlaid by the surreal. Our arrival at the airport, for example, was, as you would expect in Switzerland, on time, and the airport was also what you might expect of a Swiss airport: spotless, orderly, and convenient. But as the passengers of our flight from London filtered out into the vaulted, windowed space of the terminal it felt as if we’d entered a very clean ghost town, or a postmodern cathedral on a weekday. Besides an absence of vendors, loungers, and duty-free shops, there wasn’t even the usual rush of people to leave bread crumbs from debarkation to baggage claim. Everyone dispersed, and Mom and I found ourselves having to depend solely on signs to find our way to the exit. As we walked I imagined that robots took care of the cleaning at night, or that the floors and benches were self-cleaning, and that the whole airport operation was orchestrated from some central brain in a bunker underground: if I addressed it correctly it might respond. “Computer,” “Captain,” “Giselle, take us to observation deck fifteen.” (Big, powerful central computers are often given seductive female names, much as big boats. Someone once explained this phenomenon to me as the seductive power of all things flashy, or the confluence of a man’s growing monetary power and his waning sexual prowess.)
In such a surreal setting it was feasible to worry about finding Sarah and equally feasible to expect her sudden appearance before us out of molecules in the air. The latter version proved closer to the truth. Following the signs for the exit, we walked through the empty halls almost reverently, as if in a church or a library, and almost slowly, unlike any recent arrival at an airport that I’ve ever seen. We descended on a sporty escalator and entered the smooth, shiny, silent, and self-consciously uncomfortable airport shuttle. Inside, we looked around and wondered if we were moving in the right direction. It seemed appropriate at this point to say, “Giselle, give us Sarah Schofield’s coordinates, please,” but the big brain predicted our concerns and, obviating the need to voice the question, said in a rather seductive female voice to please hold the rail, the train would arrive at the exit in two stops. And, more or less, that’s where Sarah was waiting, one among very few other living people or lifelike robots at the reception area. We smiled, relieved; she smiled, relieved. She piled our luggage into her Audi and swept us off to what I like to call a cottage, because it was in Switzerland, was quaint, and was nestled in the idylls of the rolling hills above Zürich.
From here picture Zürich the way you’ve always pictured Zürich. Do you see a quiet, orderly, cobblestoned city surrounding a sparkling blue lake? Do you see Gothic-style churches, ecologically friendly cars, fashionable boutiques, and a clock tower about to chime the hour? Do you see unassuming European architecture? Classy, unhurried, unfettered pedestrians? Narrow, winding roads so clean one might consider removing footwear to feel the subdued pulse of the earth? A park just over the city where you might find a couple sipping white wine on a blanket or a group of locals gathered around a life-sized outdoor chessboard? Quick, efficient public transport? Public fountains that spout potable water? Rolling hillsides that alternate from forest to well-groomed farm fields? And tidy, inconspicuous cottages dotting the hillsides like wildflowers?
The parts of Zürich I saw made up a photo album for any Realtor looking to entice foreign investment. After we recovered a bit from our transatlantic flight at the beautiful, but unassuming house where Sarah works as an au pair, we drove into the city through a rolling hillside of forest and farmland, ate alongside unfettered, classy-looking Swiss at a charming vegetarian bistro called Tibits, and wandered along cobblestone streets that wound through small, fashionable boutiques and up past those ageless European churches to a park overlooking the center of the city. We meandered back into town and strolled along the flowering boardwalk of Lake Zürich, which winked and prevaricated under a setting sun.
Day two took grandmother and granddaughter on a bonding train trip to Bern, leaving Sarah’s best friend, Mika, also visiting from the States, and me to thumb through the sections on Lake Zürich in the realtor’s album on Switzerland. I felt like we were enacting some modern rendition of those classic impromptu expatriate encounters, such as A Roman Holiday, with paddleboat instead of Vespa, or Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, sans jewel heist. Mika and I trained into town through rolling hills of farm and forest, walked along the boardwalk bathed in midsummer sun, and settled on beach towels among the bronzed and lean of midweek, midday Zürich. Mika fit right in among the beautiful people basking on the banks of the lake, and I did my best to keep up, a phrase I can reuse to describe, vis-a-vis Mika, my swimming. This is how it was thus decided that I would man the paddleboat while Mika swam the width of the lake. She refused my request that she call me “coach,” and so I remained an awed, pale supporter shouting unnecessary calls of encouragement from behind the wheel of the paddleboat.
One farewell dinner of sushi on the bank of the lake and a cool walk to the train station through an impending rainstorm later, plus some adjustment to the idea of bedding down in the train’s cramped coupe-for-four, and we’re back at the next morning’s indelible smile and the start of going it on our own, at least until we met up with Neal, in Florence. But enough about Florence. How about a little Liverpool?
2006.08.04
Which reminds me, I skipped Switzerland, our first stop, in my writings. I want Switzerland and Sarah--my niece, Mom’s granddaughter and the facilitator of our two, let’s say idyllic, days in Zürich--to know that the oversight was neither intentional nor unintentional but, rather, natural. That is to say my experience in Switzerland was so flawless, relaxing, and easy from a logistical point of view (you might say everything went like clockwork) that it hardly shares the emotional tone of the trip it began. Being something like a dream, Zürich faded into the indelible smile I woke up with in the morning as the train approached Venice.
I recall this dream much in the way one recalls dreams, in fragments of the quotidian overlaid by the surreal. Our arrival at the airport, for example, was, as you would expect in Switzerland, on time, and the airport was also what you might expect of a Swiss airport: spotless, orderly, and convenient. But as the passengers of our flight from London filtered out into the vaulted, windowed space of the terminal it felt as if we’d entered a very clean ghost town, or a postmodern cathedral on a weekday. Besides an absence of vendors, loungers, and duty-free shops, there wasn’t even the usual rush of people to leave bread crumbs from debarkation to baggage claim. Everyone dispersed, and Mom and I found ourselves having to depend solely on signs to find our way to the exit. As we walked I imagined that robots took care of the cleaning at night, or that the floors and benches were self-cleaning, and that the whole airport operation was orchestrated from some central brain in a bunker underground: if I addressed it correctly it might respond. “Computer,” “Captain,” “Giselle, take us to observation deck fifteen.” (Big, powerful central computers are often given seductive female names, much as big boats. Someone once explained this phenomenon to me as the seductive power of all things flashy, or the confluence of a man’s growing monetary power and his waning sexual prowess.)
In such a surreal setting it was feasible to worry about finding Sarah and equally feasible to expect her sudden appearance before us out of molecules in the air. The latter version proved closer to the truth. Following the signs for the exit, we walked through the empty halls almost reverently, as if in a church or a library, and almost slowly, unlike any recent arrival at an airport that I’ve ever seen. We descended on a sporty escalator and entered the smooth, shiny, silent, and self-consciously uncomfortable airport shuttle. Inside, we looked around and wondered if we were moving in the right direction. It seemed appropriate at this point to say, “Giselle, give us Sarah Schofield’s coordinates, please,” but the big brain predicted our concerns and, obviating the need to voice the question, said in a rather seductive female voice to please hold the rail, the train would arrive at the exit in two stops. And, more or less, that’s where Sarah was waiting, one among very few other living people or lifelike robots at the reception area. We smiled, relieved; she smiled, relieved. She piled our luggage into her Audi and swept us off to what I like to call a cottage, because it was in Switzerland, was quaint, and was nestled in the idylls of the rolling hills above Zürich.
From here picture Zürich the way you’ve always pictured Zürich. Do you see a quiet, orderly, cobblestoned city surrounding a sparkling blue lake? Do you see Gothic-style churches, ecologically friendly cars, fashionable boutiques, and a clock tower about to chime the hour? Do you see unassuming European architecture? Classy, unhurried, unfettered pedestrians? Narrow, winding roads so clean one might consider removing footwear to feel the subdued pulse of the earth? A park just over the city where you might find a couple sipping white wine on a blanket or a group of locals gathered around a life-sized outdoor chessboard? Quick, efficient public transport? Public fountains that spout potable water? Rolling hillsides that alternate from forest to well-groomed farm fields? And tidy, inconspicuous cottages dotting the hillsides like wildflowers?
The parts of Zürich I saw made up a photo album for any Realtor looking to entice foreign investment. After we recovered a bit from our transatlantic flight at the beautiful, but unassuming house where Sarah works as an au pair, we drove into the city through a rolling hillside of forest and farmland, ate alongside unfettered, classy-looking Swiss at a charming vegetarian bistro called Tibits, and wandered along cobblestone streets that wound through small, fashionable boutiques and up past those ageless European churches to a park overlooking the center of the city. We meandered back into town and strolled along the flowering boardwalk of Lake Zürich, which winked and prevaricated under a setting sun.
Day two took grandmother and granddaughter on a bonding train trip to Bern, leaving Sarah’s best friend, Mika, also visiting from the States, and me to thumb through the sections on Lake Zürich in the realtor’s album on Switzerland. I felt like we were enacting some modern rendition of those classic impromptu expatriate encounters, such as A Roman Holiday, with paddleboat instead of Vespa, or Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, sans jewel heist. Mika and I trained into town through rolling hills of farm and forest, walked along the boardwalk bathed in midsummer sun, and settled on beach towels among the bronzed and lean of midweek, midday Zürich. Mika fit right in among the beautiful people basking on the banks of the lake, and I did my best to keep up, a phrase I can reuse to describe, vis-a-vis Mika, my swimming. This is how it was thus decided that I would man the paddleboat while Mika swam the width of the lake. She refused my request that she call me “coach,” and so I remained an awed, pale supporter shouting unnecessary calls of encouragement from behind the wheel of the paddleboat.
One farewell dinner of sushi on the bank of the lake and a cool walk to the train station through an impending rainstorm later, plus some adjustment to the idea of bedding down in the train’s cramped coupe-for-four, and we’re back at the next morning’s indelible smile and the start of going it on our own, at least until we met up with Neal, in Florence. But enough about Florence. How about a little Liverpool?
2006.08.04
03 August 2006
Florence: Conclusion
Neal will write part of the final entry on Florence, though he doesn’t know it yet. I asked him in email to remind me of the names of the members of his host family, who invited us to dine with them in their charming apartment in the foothills of their charming city. Mom and I would agree on this point: meeting local people and talking with them about their lives provide a more satisfying introduction to a place than any museum or piece of art or scoop of gelato or ancient architectural specimen.
But before we went to dinner at the Ferrinis, we went to a museum and ate gelato. We also strolled about eyeing architecture, and we did laundry (which gave us probably the greatest sense of accomplishment to this point of the trip). Having learned from our visit to the Uffizi, we gave ourselves only an hour to view the collection at the Galleria dell’ Academia. This is not to say that we rushed from room to room in order to swallow the collection in one vapid gulp. Given our time frame we chose what we most wanted to see—Michelangelo’s David—and savored it. Leading up to the central piece of the hall along both walls is an unfinished series also by Michelangelo. These large figures, frozen or trapped in the rough marble from which they seem to struggle in vain to escape, set the grandiose but somehow unassuming David off as perfect in the simple fact of its completion. It sounds as if I’m dismissing its artistic merit as merely contextual, but while I loved the unfinished works, which were each appropriately labeled “prisoner,” I found myself circling the David as I might a new car, but with more reverence, greater awe, and a much more controllable urge to run my finger along its surface. Its power was eerie and calming at once, just as it was itself at once simple and confounding.
I suspect my awe to be in part the result of setting, as I explained above, and the entrance fee, because two exact copies of it, both of which stand in the open air as the David originally stood (one before the Duomo), carried no such weight. Perhaps the indoor David is better maintained or seems bigger, bolder within its walls; perhaps I retained all my expectations of Michelangelo and my museum attention for the David alone. Or perhaps had I given the copies equal time, their power would have occurred to me as well, the power in the figure’s lines, its accuracy, in the sad, set eyes, in the historical implications of what has just occurred and what is yet to come, repose with the promise of movement, maybe sudden movement, the biblical story and, somehow, God together slung and hidden behind the figure’s back as if to foreground, instead, the human form and the humanist in Michelangelo, or the homosexual, or to suggest a faith and humility that has never seemed so knowing, so arrogant.
Thanks to Neal’s host family, we also had an unexpected chance to view the second copy of the David, which is made of bronze and has since turned the color of the Incredible Hulk. Neal mentions it below in his brief synopsis of our dinner with his host family, Bruno and Anna Ferrini, and their son, Marco:
“The address was 50 Via di Quarto, Bagno a Ripoli (I don't know the post code). That whole street (the street of unleashed dogs, blind corners, impending death) is Via di Quarto. Bagno a Ripoli is just southeast of Florence (more east than south). We took the route 33 bus. Before Bruno dropped you and Mom off in town, we stopped at Piazza Michelangelo, where the bronze copy of the David overlooks the city to the north (so the piazza is just south of the river Arno, just outside the old city wall). . . . Anyway, I know we must have talked about the Church, though I can't remember specifics. Probably something about Ana being a member for so long in Florence. Something about different missions around the world. Probably some conversation about language (tomato being the same word in Russian as well as Italian). Of course we talked about the meal. We had that summertime meal for farm laborers (I can't remember the name, but I am chasing down the recipe); you know, the one where you soak hard bread in water for 30 minutes, then mix the remaining grains with olive oil, vinegar, sliced cucumbers, tomatoes, and basil. Nobody believes me when I tell them how good it is. Something about the idea that soaking bread must make it soggy. Mom liked it, if I remember correctly. There was another meal I wasn't so fond of with rice, and Vienna sausages. There may have been more, like a main course, but I can't recall. I'm sure there was no meat, per your request. We drank Bionda, a Tuscany favorite (and, subsequently, only available in Tuscany). And of course we had fresh mozzarella, and marveled at it as at a newborn child. I remember I couldn't finish it because I was so full, and you refused it because you were so full.”
A better meal by far, and a bigger one, than the meal Mom and I hurried to have on the banks of the Arno before our last night’s activity: a recital of the Florence International Music Campus in the hall of the centuries-old English Church of St. Mark, Via Magio 18. An expensive shared risotto, but the sunset that accompanied it was priceless, and the way the light gilded the river and the shops on Ponte Vecchio fit right into our Italian “finale,” and the whole scene now coheres in my memory like a postcard. Whenever I pull out the postcard, I smell the cool air of that evening, see the vivid blue of the river, green of its banks, and I hear the sounds of a technically proficient eight-year-old at the violin, the full operatic tenor of an exchange student from America singing Verdi, Schubert, and Tosti, and a collection of Japanese piano students in pastel dresses at an all-black Yamaha playing Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Debussy, and, as if I’d requested it for the finale of our final day, Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 op 23 in G minor.
The benches were wooden and the backs were sticky from the varnish that failed more miserably than we patrons to stand up against the heat in the church. It was a vicious cycle. The hard bench required continual, but subtle, shifting of weight; each subtle shift made the sound of someone removing unwanted tape from a countertop; and the church echoed each shift as if tattling on each of us for daring to feel discomfort during Debussy. The concert started late and lasted well past eleven, but despite this and any physical inconvenience, we held on for Chopin, exited stiff and mesmerized, and found ourselves in late-evening Florence among the unparalleled quiet and fragrant cool of the ancient artistic center. We felt compelled to walk briskly, partly to comply with habit, partly to get the blood flowing, partly to shuttle through the unknown of a foreign midnight. But this unexpected landscape was perhaps the more intriguing for its unfamiliarity. Its Italian streets seemed more authentic in the conspicuous absence of tourists, and in that absence we two tourists suddenly faded into the possibility, however remote, of fitting in.
But before we went to dinner at the Ferrinis, we went to a museum and ate gelato. We also strolled about eyeing architecture, and we did laundry (which gave us probably the greatest sense of accomplishment to this point of the trip). Having learned from our visit to the Uffizi, we gave ourselves only an hour to view the collection at the Galleria dell’ Academia. This is not to say that we rushed from room to room in order to swallow the collection in one vapid gulp. Given our time frame we chose what we most wanted to see—Michelangelo’s David—and savored it. Leading up to the central piece of the hall along both walls is an unfinished series also by Michelangelo. These large figures, frozen or trapped in the rough marble from which they seem to struggle in vain to escape, set the grandiose but somehow unassuming David off as perfect in the simple fact of its completion. It sounds as if I’m dismissing its artistic merit as merely contextual, but while I loved the unfinished works, which were each appropriately labeled “prisoner,” I found myself circling the David as I might a new car, but with more reverence, greater awe, and a much more controllable urge to run my finger along its surface. Its power was eerie and calming at once, just as it was itself at once simple and confounding.
I suspect my awe to be in part the result of setting, as I explained above, and the entrance fee, because two exact copies of it, both of which stand in the open air as the David originally stood (one before the Duomo), carried no such weight. Perhaps the indoor David is better maintained or seems bigger, bolder within its walls; perhaps I retained all my expectations of Michelangelo and my museum attention for the David alone. Or perhaps had I given the copies equal time, their power would have occurred to me as well, the power in the figure’s lines, its accuracy, in the sad, set eyes, in the historical implications of what has just occurred and what is yet to come, repose with the promise of movement, maybe sudden movement, the biblical story and, somehow, God together slung and hidden behind the figure’s back as if to foreground, instead, the human form and the humanist in Michelangelo, or the homosexual, or to suggest a faith and humility that has never seemed so knowing, so arrogant.
Thanks to Neal’s host family, we also had an unexpected chance to view the second copy of the David, which is made of bronze and has since turned the color of the Incredible Hulk. Neal mentions it below in his brief synopsis of our dinner with his host family, Bruno and Anna Ferrini, and their son, Marco:
“The address was 50 Via di Quarto, Bagno a Ripoli (I don't know the post code). That whole street (the street of unleashed dogs, blind corners, impending death) is Via di Quarto. Bagno a Ripoli is just southeast of Florence (more east than south). We took the route 33 bus. Before Bruno dropped you and Mom off in town, we stopped at Piazza Michelangelo, where the bronze copy of the David overlooks the city to the north (so the piazza is just south of the river Arno, just outside the old city wall). . . . Anyway, I know we must have talked about the Church, though I can't remember specifics. Probably something about Ana being a member for so long in Florence. Something about different missions around the world. Probably some conversation about language (tomato being the same word in Russian as well as Italian). Of course we talked about the meal. We had that summertime meal for farm laborers (I can't remember the name, but I am chasing down the recipe); you know, the one where you soak hard bread in water for 30 minutes, then mix the remaining grains with olive oil, vinegar, sliced cucumbers, tomatoes, and basil. Nobody believes me when I tell them how good it is. Something about the idea that soaking bread must make it soggy. Mom liked it, if I remember correctly. There was another meal I wasn't so fond of with rice, and Vienna sausages. There may have been more, like a main course, but I can't recall. I'm sure there was no meat, per your request. We drank Bionda, a Tuscany favorite (and, subsequently, only available in Tuscany). And of course we had fresh mozzarella, and marveled at it as at a newborn child. I remember I couldn't finish it because I was so full, and you refused it because you were so full.”
A better meal by far, and a bigger one, than the meal Mom and I hurried to have on the banks of the Arno before our last night’s activity: a recital of the Florence International Music Campus in the hall of the centuries-old English Church of St. Mark, Via Magio 18. An expensive shared risotto, but the sunset that accompanied it was priceless, and the way the light gilded the river and the shops on Ponte Vecchio fit right into our Italian “finale,” and the whole scene now coheres in my memory like a postcard. Whenever I pull out the postcard, I smell the cool air of that evening, see the vivid blue of the river, green of its banks, and I hear the sounds of a technically proficient eight-year-old at the violin, the full operatic tenor of an exchange student from America singing Verdi, Schubert, and Tosti, and a collection of Japanese piano students in pastel dresses at an all-black Yamaha playing Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Debussy, and, as if I’d requested it for the finale of our final day, Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 op 23 in G minor.
The benches were wooden and the backs were sticky from the varnish that failed more miserably than we patrons to stand up against the heat in the church. It was a vicious cycle. The hard bench required continual, but subtle, shifting of weight; each subtle shift made the sound of someone removing unwanted tape from a countertop; and the church echoed each shift as if tattling on each of us for daring to feel discomfort during Debussy. The concert started late and lasted well past eleven, but despite this and any physical inconvenience, we held on for Chopin, exited stiff and mesmerized, and found ourselves in late-evening Florence among the unparalleled quiet and fragrant cool of the ancient artistic center. We felt compelled to walk briskly, partly to comply with habit, partly to get the blood flowing, partly to shuttle through the unknown of a foreign midnight. But this unexpected landscape was perhaps the more intriguing for its unfamiliarity. Its Italian streets seemed more authentic in the conspicuous absence of tourists, and in that absence we two tourists suddenly faded into the possibility, however remote, of fitting in.
02 August 2006
Florence: Continued
Florence is not the eternal city, but walking its endless corridors and halls of renaissance art gives it an eternal quality, which left Mom and me limping around on our museum legs in a haze of evolving iconography and two-dimensional perspective. “Saunteritis” (Mom’s term), however, did not deter us from navigating the ticketing system and the lines and the labyrinthine nature of two of the major museums in Florence, especially with Neal as our underpaid, overburdened guide to contextualize the miles of masterpiece.
The Uffizi gallery, an old government building that was slowly overtaken by a growing art collection and finally wholly transformed into a museum, houses works by Durer, Raphael, Goya, Rembrandt, Gentileschi, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Boticelli, among others, in rooms too dark and too hot and too humid for even a layperson’s artistic sensibility. But the jungle conditions and the awkward glares hardly lessened the delicate beauty of Botticelli’s mythic heroine in his wall-sized “Birth of Venus” or the viewer’s uneasy recognition of Christ, still crowned and blood-stained, rising from the tomb in Luca di Leida’s “Cristo Coronato di spine.” Or, especially for Neal, of Rembrandt’s later self-portrait, dark and obscured from behind soft eyes, chiaroscuro lighting, and the centuries of accumulated dust. For Neal the portrait showed not only the artist’s apotheosis in his craft but also the subtle accumulation and summary weight on an artist of internal and external expectation, public misunderstanding and commodification, and the ubiquity of an artist’s sense of inadequacy. “I feel a certain affinity for that essence,” he said, and so I spent a few extra seconds folded into the sunken eyes trying to catch a glimpse of that essence.
What I caught instead was a general interest in the technical evolution of art, which we witnessed as we sauntered from room to room. Neal pointed it out in Gioto's work, which displayed a growing sense and control of three-dimensional perspective in a two-dimensional environment. Gioto gets closer and closer until he finally gets it, and this evolutionary leap comes to characterize the era and the term that later came to identify it: renaissance. Not unlike his students, Mom and I began to question our in-house pedagogue on theoretical grounds; for example, I said, perhaps Italian artists simply didn’t share an aesthetic that would embrace three-dimensional realism, not unlike ancient Egyptian artists. “Whose rules of perspective,” Neal countered, “were determined by a rich and strict symbology, like Christian iconography in the West, which dictates the size and placement of figures according to mythological status instead of mathematical perspective.” I didn’t argue long. Instead, during a brief period of rest on a bench in a corridor, Mom and I gave full attention and deference to our resident art expert, who took to giving us our first lesson in line drawing: three-dimensional perspective, that monumental discovery that, now, figures into the most basic curriculum of the would-be artist.
Mom and I made decent students and unpromising artists, but ardent believers that, as Neal told us, anyone can learn to draw if given proper instruction. The next day I put what I learned to work on a sketch of an unfinished sculpture by Michelangelo in the Galleria dell’ Academia, and managed to transform one of Michelangelo’s “prisoners” into a gentrified three-armed hoola dancer. The base I put him on, however, was so completely convincing thanks to Neal’s lesson on three-dimensional perspective that had I not referenced the source of the drawing in my notebook a disinterested viewer may have thought it a decent likeness.
The renaissance of painting, as Neal pointed out, was not only a rebirth of technique on a higher plane but also an evolution of expression and thought. This point and the ultimate payoff of the Uffizi’s lines, labyrinthine layout, and humidity collided just before our exit in Artemisia Gentileschi’s famous 1567 rendition of Judith beheading Holofernes. Where Boticelli’s iteration—one of the first paintings we encountered in the Uffizi—of this same biblical story rendered the scene in the traditional format with a dainty, almost boyish Judith balancing a languid foot on the bloodless head of Holofernes as if trying on shoes in front of a mirror, Gentileschi gives Judith brawny arms and determined eyes and puts her directly in the bloody act of severing that head full of curly hair from its burly, drunken body. This is five hundred year-old feminism, and the three of us couldn’t have been more pleased with the contrast.
The Uffizi gallery, an old government building that was slowly overtaken by a growing art collection and finally wholly transformed into a museum, houses works by Durer, Raphael, Goya, Rembrandt, Gentileschi, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Boticelli, among others, in rooms too dark and too hot and too humid for even a layperson’s artistic sensibility. But the jungle conditions and the awkward glares hardly lessened the delicate beauty of Botticelli’s mythic heroine in his wall-sized “Birth of Venus” or the viewer’s uneasy recognition of Christ, still crowned and blood-stained, rising from the tomb in Luca di Leida’s “Cristo Coronato di spine.” Or, especially for Neal, of Rembrandt’s later self-portrait, dark and obscured from behind soft eyes, chiaroscuro lighting, and the centuries of accumulated dust. For Neal the portrait showed not only the artist’s apotheosis in his craft but also the subtle accumulation and summary weight on an artist of internal and external expectation, public misunderstanding and commodification, and the ubiquity of an artist’s sense of inadequacy. “I feel a certain affinity for that essence,” he said, and so I spent a few extra seconds folded into the sunken eyes trying to catch a glimpse of that essence.
What I caught instead was a general interest in the technical evolution of art, which we witnessed as we sauntered from room to room. Neal pointed it out in Gioto's work, which displayed a growing sense and control of three-dimensional perspective in a two-dimensional environment. Gioto gets closer and closer until he finally gets it, and this evolutionary leap comes to characterize the era and the term that later came to identify it: renaissance. Not unlike his students, Mom and I began to question our in-house pedagogue on theoretical grounds; for example, I said, perhaps Italian artists simply didn’t share an aesthetic that would embrace three-dimensional realism, not unlike ancient Egyptian artists. “Whose rules of perspective,” Neal countered, “were determined by a rich and strict symbology, like Christian iconography in the West, which dictates the size and placement of figures according to mythological status instead of mathematical perspective.” I didn’t argue long. Instead, during a brief period of rest on a bench in a corridor, Mom and I gave full attention and deference to our resident art expert, who took to giving us our first lesson in line drawing: three-dimensional perspective, that monumental discovery that, now, figures into the most basic curriculum of the would-be artist.
Mom and I made decent students and unpromising artists, but ardent believers that, as Neal told us, anyone can learn to draw if given proper instruction. The next day I put what I learned to work on a sketch of an unfinished sculpture by Michelangelo in the Galleria dell’ Academia, and managed to transform one of Michelangelo’s “prisoners” into a gentrified three-armed hoola dancer. The base I put him on, however, was so completely convincing thanks to Neal’s lesson on three-dimensional perspective that had I not referenced the source of the drawing in my notebook a disinterested viewer may have thought it a decent likeness.
The renaissance of painting, as Neal pointed out, was not only a rebirth of technique on a higher plane but also an evolution of expression and thought. This point and the ultimate payoff of the Uffizi’s lines, labyrinthine layout, and humidity collided just before our exit in Artemisia Gentileschi’s famous 1567 rendition of Judith beheading Holofernes. Where Boticelli’s iteration—one of the first paintings we encountered in the Uffizi—of this same biblical story rendered the scene in the traditional format with a dainty, almost boyish Judith balancing a languid foot on the bloodless head of Holofernes as if trying on shoes in front of a mirror, Gentileschi gives Judith brawny arms and determined eyes and puts her directly in the bloody act of severing that head full of curly hair from its burly, drunken body. This is five hundred year-old feminism, and the three of us couldn’t have been more pleased with the contrast.
01 August 2006
Florence: Introduction
For a moment, while our train sat at its origin in Rome we feared no air conditioning. We found unexpected solace in the accompanying fears of fellow riders, whose status as natives added credibility to our suspicion that the lack of a/c was not the norm for this first-class car and assuaged our continual fear that we as tourists find ourselves innately inadequate to navigate a social structure without language or sufficient knowledge of culture and customs. Mom whipped out her trusty yellow fan, one of our first purchases upon arrival in Rome, that hot spot, and we set to discussing options in a worst-case scenario before the heat got to our powers of logic. One, to detrain at some unknown station when we couldn’t stand the heat any longer and to catch another train with the sincere hope that it would be air conditioned; or, two, to debark now and find another train. We decided to hold out when we saw the conductor running here and there as if working on the problem. Which turned out to be the case, and we traveled in a lukecool cabin until our thirty-minute layover one stop shy of our destination.
Florence. Neal had already made it a little bit of home by the time we found him in his studio not far from the Duomo and in his resident artist’s beard. And such a meaty beard it was that as soon as Mom and I returned to the hotel room on Via de Calzaiuoli I shaved my pitiful two-week rendition. Previous experience tempered the potential surreality of a reunion in a foreign setting, and so instead of ohing and ahing over the novelty of it we got straight to telling stories, taking pictures, and making comments, some congratulatory, some critical, about Neal’s beard. (“What a bushy beard you have.” “The better to assert my credibility in the classroom via the appearance of age, my dear.”)
Mom, in one of the stories we ran through during this reunion, had left her travel BoM lying somewhere on her bed in Utah after a last-minute search for our train passes. Neal, who had the news of the omission from Michelle, who had it directly from the horse herself before departure from Baltimore, tossed Mom a little red book across one of the workstations without warning. Mom nabbed it out of the air like a professional second basewoman, figured it for a replacement travel BoM, and returned the volley with a thank you all in one fluid movement. Neal worked the travel BoM back to second with a similar fluid obstinacy, and there it remained, the first of several generous exchanges that would make Florence and, later, England, a landmark family memory.
2006.08.01
Florence. Neal had already made it a little bit of home by the time we found him in his studio not far from the Duomo and in his resident artist’s beard. And such a meaty beard it was that as soon as Mom and I returned to the hotel room on Via de Calzaiuoli I shaved my pitiful two-week rendition. Previous experience tempered the potential surreality of a reunion in a foreign setting, and so instead of ohing and ahing over the novelty of it we got straight to telling stories, taking pictures, and making comments, some congratulatory, some critical, about Neal’s beard. (“What a bushy beard you have.” “The better to assert my credibility in the classroom via the appearance of age, my dear.”)
Mom, in one of the stories we ran through during this reunion, had left her travel BoM lying somewhere on her bed in Utah after a last-minute search for our train passes. Neal, who had the news of the omission from Michelle, who had it directly from the horse herself before departure from Baltimore, tossed Mom a little red book across one of the workstations without warning. Mom nabbed it out of the air like a professional second basewoman, figured it for a replacement travel BoM, and returned the volley with a thank you all in one fluid movement. Neal worked the travel BoM back to second with a similar fluid obstinacy, and there it remained, the first of several generous exchanges that would make Florence and, later, England, a landmark family memory.
2006.08.01
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