wave of mutilation

This string of five coastal towns – this Cinque Terre, composed of Riomaggiore, Manarola, Corniglia, Vernazza, and Monterosso from head to tail – certainly has its appeal. If you like a pristine and charming coastal beauty with jutting promontories and precipitous, sheer-face drops into a churning sea, then Cinque Terre should top your list of places to visit. And if you like endless hiking trails, and looking down onto towns spread like brickwork butter over mountainous loaves of bread, then Cinque Terre could very well be your heaven.

But for me, Cinque Terre was a bit of a disappointment, and a bit of a contradiction in itself. I expected a place like this to be calm and peaceful – with just you and nature and the crashing waves and no other sound – but Cinque Terre is, pound for pound, the most tourist-overrun destination I have visited so far, and that includes Bruges. And when the town you are staying in is one street long, and up and down you gaze upon swarms of tourists buzzing around their respective raised and folded guide umbrellas, it can seem a little maddening.

And those waves – the nonstop, incessant crashing against the rocks! I enjoyed the sound at first, I thought it calming and soothing – I sat outside and read to it for hours. But after a while, when it is the only thing that echoes in your head – when it has driven out all other thought with its pounding – when it plays on an endless loop over and over and over again, you feel as if it is the soundtrack to some untimely lunacy.

Cinque Terre is beautiful, for sure – but if you visit, do so with a large, soft buffer between yourself and peak season. And bring a lot of money, or a flexible credit card – because food and lodging here are potentially breaking.

Cinque Terre soundtrack – the waves… the waves… the waves…

an exposition of sorts

Those of you who know me well know that I am a quiet person. I am reserved. Temperate. If you are comfortable with it, we could just as well sit for an hour with not a word passed between. I don’t mind silence – I rather enjoy it at times: I think silence between two people often reveals more than conversation. Which is not to say that we should only communicate through glances or intimation – there are things in this world that need discussion, require discussion: things that must know the public forum.

But to me, the discussion of other people is not one of these things. I don’t know why, I can’t fully explain it – it is one of my peculiarities, perhaps one of my flaws. I don’t gossip, I don’t speculate. If you start talking about someone, even a stranger, chances are I’ll sit there in silence, contemplating the carpet. I won’t object – I just won’t contribute much. This is the way I’ve always been.

I have no sound explanation for it, except that maybe I like to think of only the good in people – and gossip, and discussion of personality, so often hinges on the perceived bad. Which is completely understandable – flaws are what make us unique, individual and interesting; flaws are what make us human. They are the very things which distinguish us from other animals, and from automatons. But I derive no great joy in discussing these flaws – just as I take no pleasure in the pain or misfortune of others, just as I can’t watch clips of accidents or most of reality television, just as I can’t watch the first half of American Idol or game shows that put people to lie detectors with the intention of hurting more than they help.

Which is why The Price is Right is, in my opinion, fantastic good fun – everyone wins, everyone is happy (as long as the price is right).

And it doesn’t matter the subject – family, friend, or complete stranger – my feeling doesn’t change. And it’s not that I see anything wrong with discussing other people, or with gossip in general – I think it can be wonderfully cathartic for certain individuals, and is perhaps the world’s oldest pastime. But I am just not one of its advocates.

I think about the stuff all the time, of course. Different characters I’ve met, the ways people act and react. How fascinating are we as a culture, composed of so many millions of contradictions and variations – and yet, when falling aggregate on a winter’s field, we form this great, expansive, homogenous blanket of man? The answer is: very.

Then how can I be a writer of worth, you say, and not enjoy discussing personalities? I don’t know – maybe I won’t amount to much of a writer at all. Maybe this is one of my weaknesses – what will consign me to the cold but cramped guest quarters of mediocrity. But I am also stubborn, the subject of another exposition perhaps. And so I will not begrudge you your public investigation of personality – I will just conduct mine in private.

And I will discuss, in my own muted way, anything else I have knowledge of in this whole wide, wondrous world – music, sports, film, literature, politics, or paint peeling – but just not, for reasons perhaps pertaining only to myself, other people.

a woman in passing

She stood there, face angled toward the monitor, waiting in silence for the platform number to appear. In one hand rolled back and forth the handle of her traveled suitcase – in the other her purse. And she had wide country eyes, and lips that turned up more than down, and a neck slender and porcelain. And as we both looked away from the screen our eyes met, and we held each other so for but a moment, warmly – as if there was recognition in those ten feet between.

We shared a smile – just a sliver of one, fleeting. Then 23 flashed bright and beckoning and we looked at the train, and turned toward the things we were certain of.

And though I’ve never seen this woman before, and never will again, I can’t help but wonder if – in some parallel reality on another platform in time – we had known each other well.

backwards and in high heels

I remember the first time I watched Swing Time, huddled on my dorm room bed in the white middle of winter, comforter at my neck – my roommate’s 15inch TV/VCR combo balanced on my chair. I remember sitting there, face inches from the screen, my eyes fixed on its grainy glow – and I remember watching Fred Astaire glide effortlessly across the dance floor like an ice-cube on wax paper, so fluid and so very smooth. I remember the songs, and the way you look tonight. I remember thinking Ginger Rogers was beautiful – so graceful and charming, so lithe. And I remember sitting there smiling, uncontrollably, until my cheeks started trembling. And when it was finished, and the credits rolled, I stopped the tape and pressed rewind and watched it all again.

It was the same when I first listened to Revolver, and Blonde on Blonde – the same when I first read Frost. The discovery of something so completely in tune with your person – something that cuts through all your caution and guarding like a scalpel through fat and touches, in one pass, your heart – is an amazing experience. You are in this moment of discovery completely vulnerable – you are in this moment at your most human.

I have had, on this trip so far, several moments like this. The first on the streets of Amsterdam; the second at the Borghese Gallery in Rome beside Bernini’s amazing marble sculptures of Apollo and Daphne and Pluto and Proserpina; and the third most recently in Florence at the Uffizi Gallery, standing before the works of Botticelli. I had seen the Birth of Venus before – who has not – but to see it in person – to stand inches from the canvas – was, for lack of a better word, breathtaking. The colors are so soft and temperate up close, but so striking at a distance – and the whole scene is at once both beautifully comical and deeply reverent. And to discover for the first time his Fortitude and his Columny of Apelles, and to discover new artists like Bronzino – what an experience.

I hope the rest of my life is filled with such firsts. And I hope one day to feel so moved by some woman, sitting there – smiling at the wind for no apparent reason. But until then I am satisfied to feel as I do for my poetry and prose, my movies and my music.

Feel so – for my art.

in constant pursuit

Creation is such a powerful drug. When you get in a rhythm and start drawing or writing and the perspective works and the rhymes are sharp and crisp – when you really get going and that primal, pulsatile energy starts beaming through your center and out from your fingertips and you feel overcome by some tremendous elation, like when you breathe in deeply and hold a smile – this is creation at its most potent, and most wonderful, effect. It is so comforting, so elegant: in that one moment you feel as if you have accomplished something singularly great.

But as with any drug the feeling doesn’t last, and pretty soon what you thought was great and liberating seems – separate from the act of creating – simple, and burdened by banality. And you crash. And you hit lows, when nothing seems to rhyme anymore; when the lead crumbles under a gentle pressure. And sometimes the block lasts for a long while and you do nothing new, and it weighs heavy on your mind the thought of how it could feel. It is an artistic, substance-induced depression of sorts.

I have to think many artists feel this way, and that I am not alone in this sentiment. We are tormented by our art – drawn, perhaps subconsciously, toward a need to feel that rush one more time. And so we push and try always to create: because, in many ways, we only – in all the living that we do – feel fully alive when we are so doing. And we push and try often prematurely, when we are not ready or not properly equipped to handle the consequences.

At least that's how I see it. Maybe I am wrong – maybe this is just a weakness in my character. I don’t know.

But if ever I seem moody, or downtrodden – when none of the whales seem worth hunting – this, perhaps, is the reason why.

my kingdom for gelato

I am now so damned picky when it comes to gelato. I am a gelato snob. An aficionado of the most focused and passionate ilk. I was afraid this would happen – afraid now of the consequences, especially when I leave Italy in a few days and start craving that sweet, oh that most delectable delicacy – softly scooped out from the dreamscape of angels.

This list is for everyone, but even more so to remind me of my newly formed principles and the standards by which certain things should be judged. And so here is a top five list of things to watch out for and bear in mind when selecting your gelato in Italy:

5. If someone is standing outside of a gelateria telling you to “eat here, it’s the best!” – don’t: he’s a professional liar.

4. Never buy gelato from a place with multilingual placards. Italian is the language of Italy.

3. Real pistachio gelato should still have shells in it. Eat them like a man.

2. Highly piled and lavishly decorated gelati are trying to compensate for lack of flavor – go for the minimalist basins, with maybe a small ripple of a design on top. But nothing more.

1. NEVER buy gelato within fifty feet of a major tourist attraction. It will taste like you got ripped off.

Happy eating.

mi scuzzi – il conto, per favore…

I have had, I think, too much of Rome. Perhaps the kid in a candy store analogy was more appropriate than I thought – perhaps this is the morning after the binge, when I sit huddled in a corner shaking… convulsing. Praying for the passing.

Which is so very strange to me since I’d normally eat this all in and not feel wretched. I thought I would love the taste of Rome – all that rich, sumptuous history mixed with a hint of Mediterranean charm and a dash of that spicy Italian passion. Cooked over a gentle heat, served with a glass of red wine. Maybe an accordion gently folding in the background. I thought I would shut down the buffet, bust out the Kobayashi Shuffle and just keep going.

But something didn’t sit right.

It’s not all the history and architecture – that I love. It’s the city itself. Rome is dirty. I come back at the end of the day and rub my hands with soap and warm water and watch as the basin turns black – and I wonder whose blood it is that I now wash away. The romantic in me, perhaps – who loves the quaint and quiet villas, the candlelit dinners, the sound – at times – of silence.

New York City on a plate is what it is, and knows it is deliciously filling, and if you don’t like what you ordered then to hell with you, don’t come back. But Rome… Rome tries so hard to sell itself, with so much accordion garnish and “Ciao, Bella!” on the side that after a while you lose your appetite. And then you look around, and realize there are cigarette butts underfoot and the floor is scuffed black with heel-marks, and things creep and crawl in dark corners.

And the chef stands there smiling sardonically, hair-net in his back pocket, picking at his grease-stained nails.