Check it out at the photo site (link at right).
Monthly Archive for April, 2002
I found a ‘net cafe that lets you use your laptop, so this one is direct. I forgot what a live, hella fast connection with a live, hella fast computer really feels like. All other cafes are so stunted in security and logins and too many users for a puny DSL line. This is so cool… Anyway, I’m going to try, today, to upload pictures of Venice. It should work. More sizable update before I leave for London (on Saturday). Much love.
Was amazing. Charming is perhaps a better word. Hours could be spent, and were, by me and Nadia, lazily wandering the labrynth of alleys and canals that is Venice. We only really hit one touristy spot: San Marco and its square. There was a Jackson Pollock exhibition there which was extremely interesting. Trippy, even. The part of my mind that secretly loves bad puns (I must get it from dad) also wants to say ‘drippy.’ Other than San Marco, really we just walked around. It was entirely pleasurable.
sidenote:
Opulent churches like that make me angry. San Marco was less so, because I was so buoyed by the experience of just being in Venice, but still. I consider them vast wastes of money. There are so many things out there that deserve the money that was spent on that church. There are millions of causes and always will be. I dislike the whole idea of building something opulent in order to somehow please/honor God. There’s something very false-idol about it. I mean, in the end, don’t you want your attention to be entirely on God when you’re in Church? I think Luther may have been right: simplicity. No mediator. God is bigger than any statue you can make of or for him or any song you sing. He is the dust that rises from the first strike of the sculptor and the air that vibrates with the chorus. No amount of opulence can possibly impress God. Jesus was a carpenter. The man spent his days making wooden shelves and drinking cups. Simple. God is God becuase he is everything and everywhere, yet is simplicity itself. He just is. I’d rather be humble before God, not to mention honset as hell, not try to impress him with how much cash I’m willing to jettison on some phallus. But that’s just me. Back to Venice.
So we walked. A lot. All over the alce. Along all the coasts of the islands, through countless tiny alleys and small squares with their covered public wells and trattoria (sidewalk caf�, but we didn’t know that). Countless Americans, too, by the way. More than in Australia. I found that surprising. Our first night we went to Trattoria del something. I want to say del Sempiore, but I don’t know. To summarize, it was the best meal of my life. I had a fillet with whisky sauce (o mon dieu… Nadia made fun of me for my groans and stunned looks of pleasure) and vegetables, and a perfect lemon sorbet. It was all rounded with a bottle of Chianto Classico and after-dinner Grappa that we dared each other into. We went out after, mingled with some funny Italian people, and fell lazily asleep.
Nad woke up earlier than I did. She did things. I have no clue. I heard her get up but I just went right back to sleep. We checked out and had breakfast, then left our bags with the Concierge. More walking. It was still entirely agreeable. We occasionally marvelled just at the fact that we were there, that the cold stones of the walls really existed. The place is bloody magical, it really is. Life was good in Venice.
I should add, though, that the train rides there and back were less than pleasurable. We lucked out I guess, given that we didn’t get robbed or in a fight. The worst thing that happened was that we got stuck with some French people who grumble in low Gallic tones the whole way, even in sleep.
Other than that, it was a beautiful, amazing, memorable trip. I’m coming back.
Pictures forthcoming…
New pictures up on the picture site. Dig it. I’m about to leave for Venice, which itself should garner quite an update when I get back. Much love.
Is that how it’s spelled, when someone looks at your haircut and says they like the new ‘do’? I never really thought about that till right now. Regardless, I’m tampering with the look of this site. The other version was a little too boring for me. You can be sure to see multiple new versions this week. Just thought I’d keep you aware.
I’ve been coughing for five days straight. This is the root of all my current evils. The constant cough, its sound and ability to contract my body have prevented me from sleeping and given me a splitting headache. Then, in an injury worthy of the Three Stooges, I think I pulled a muscle in my neck tonight during one particularly nasty fit. The cough also has generated this lovely burn in the back of my throat that doesn’t seem to go away for anything. Not fun. Your guess is as good as mine as to what’s causing it. Popular hypotheses have ranged from dust to the fact that there was lots of sun last week (yea, got me on that one, too; the popular French epithet ‘Ey, c’est la vie,’ used in all cases ranging from a questionably bitter cup of coffee that you complain about to thermonuclear war, has been replaced in my mind by a slightly different phrase: ‘Eh, it’s the French�’ I say this because I’ve sort of stopped questioning the maddeningly odd responses the French give sometimes and instead substituted a shrug and a ‘Eh, it’s the French’ for any analysis.) Anyway, the cough has to go. It’s killing me.
Monaco
I’ve been thinking a lot about Monaco, lately. Especially, today, since Lauren and I ventured West along the coast to Cannes. Going West from Nice is a little like Dante’s slow route down into hell. The scenery fades from the lower side of modest to structurally questionable, the graffiti from sparse but noticeable to quadruple-layered. It is the exact opposite of going East to Monaco.
A Journey to Monaco
One leaves Nice-Ville station surrounded on both sides by decent-looking apartment buildings. These fade into decent-looking houses. One looks down at a magazine for a minute and before one knows it one is surrounded by beautiful houses and a gently arching coastline, cozy harbors with medium-size sailboats and, weather-permitting, the odd collection of old-men sunbathing on rocky beaches. The hills of these towns, Villefrance, Breagne-sur-Mer, Eze, etc. seem vertical, their houses somehow carved into sheer cliff wall. One gets closer as the train snakes around the harbors and they seem less steep but higher than one had previously estimated, the calculated views all the more breathtaking. Magazine forgotten, one wonders, regardless of current economic condition, how much a summer place up there would be. A few minutes later, a tunnel one could not be bothered to see appears and covers the Mediterranean bliss. Lights flash by like the beginning of Half-Life, getting ever farther apart as the train slows. As one follows the ‘Sortie’ signs to the exit, one is drawn, naturally, to the natural light coming in from the right and one realizes that one is in a train station that is entirely self-contained inside a mountain. A few escalators later, one rounds a corner and sees, down a pass beautifully layered with orange-topped houses, a small harbor ringed by a small curving peninsula. Above, one sees a sign ‘Bienvenue � Monaco.’ The policeman to ones immediate right, the first of many, tips his hat and says ‘Bonjour,’ with what might be a wink. Welcome to Monaco.
Signs
The first thing Lauren and I noticed upon arriving in Monaco, were the cleanliness and the police presence. Upon passing an Aston Martin dealership a few minutes later, we soon added ‘beautiful cars’ to the list of things immediately visible (While I was gawking through the window at the hand-crafted Vantage, a Ferrari of some sort, too fast to tell, passed right behind me). Like many things, these three immediately visible things are all the result of economics.
High Rollers and History
One of the reasons the principality of Monaco is so popular a residence of the mega-rich is that there are no taxes. When Menton, a neighboring region, was ceded to France in 1860, Monaco was deprived of the revenue from its extremely profitable lemon and olive crops. The government (i.e. the Royalty, Prince Charles III and his family), needed another convenient way to fill its coffers and they decided on a Casino. The returns on this investment eventually became so large that the Prince saw that he really didn’t need to tax his subjects at all. Nice guy. Here’s where the economics come into play though: while Casino owners and operators love and cherish the quarters that you give them in the slot machines, you are really probably only just paying for their overhead. The big money that they make is with the high rollers: rich dudes with plenty of money to burn. High rollers are the most important people in a Casino, to a Casino owner anyway, so they must be kept happy:
�High rollers do not want filthy sidewalks, graffiti, or begging homeless people. Monaco is small enough (smaller, all told, than Central Park) that this is easily accomplishable. Everything, every public sidewalk, every park, every handrail, has a look to it that could be described as ‘spit-polished.’ My understanding is that the public works people in general are very well compensated.
�High rollers also do not want to have to worry about their Ferraris being keyed, their wives mugged in the street, etc. so not only is there the pervasive and extremely visible police presence, but the Big Brother-like creepy mystery of the hidden cameras. Apparently there are 150+ of these buggers hidden across the principality, recording and ready to catch any possible grievances. It’s quite a system they’ve got there, if a little crimping on what I as an American view as my god-given civil liberties. The idea of hidden cameras in public places controlled by a government entity makes me jittery. But hey, I don’t live there.
Unrelenting
The observation that may not strike immediately about Monaco, but will undoubtedly rise at some point during anyone’s stay there, is its unrelenting, never-disappointing, jaw-dropping physical beauty. A huge mountain slopes down to the sea, a wave of orange topped houses splashing to meet it. A palace sits atop a jutting peninsula with vertical cliff walls on three sides. A horseshoe-shaped harbor on the Casino-side houses boats ranging from normal 26-foot outboarders to boats so big they could double as cruiseliners in neat lines, their polished ivory color daring the blue-green water they rest in. The other side of the palace sees another harbor with still more sparkling boats, an elevated garden � la Hunterw�sser, and a boldly angled stadium. The other side of the Casino, to the east, sees miles of houses built into hills, high plateaus with small white dots of observatories perched atop, the coast drunkenly swerving in and out to the beauty that is Northern Italy. It’s a gorgeous place.
Voodoo Economics
One practical but interesting note is that Monaco, home of the worlds rich and elite, is cheaper than Nice! Nice, the red-headed stepchild of a beautiful civilization, dares charge more than Monaco! How is this possible? Literally, it is cheaper for me to get on a train to Monaco, eat lunch there, drinks and all, get back on a train to Nice for my afternoon classes than it would be to eat in Nice itself. I went to Monaco with extra money, as I expected to have to pay 8 Euro for a bottle of water, but it ended up being the least expensive day I’ve had in the Riviera!
A Lead-in
During our all-day, self-navigated tour of Monaco, Lauren and I also make like race-car drivers and walked most of the Formula 1 Grand Prix route. It’s quite a route. One of the smallest in Formula 1, but one of the most intense: great scenery, stunning turns, plenty of overtaking opportunities. Lauren is an F1 nut, so I had countless F1 trivia thrown at me throughout the day. The Grand Prix, this year, is a day I’m really looking forward to.—Where are my seats? you ask.—Oh, haha, I laugh. I don’t have tickets.—Oh� you trail off. Friend’s got a hotel room to view from then, eh?—Uh, nope, I respond, cracking a smile at your eyebrow-lowering confusion.—Well, you say, in a last ditch creative effort, do you have someplace cool to watch the Grand Prix from?—Nope, I laugh.—Well, dammit, where are you going to be on May 28th that’s so great?—Paris, I say, smiling from ear to ear. Picking up my Mom, my Aunt Nancy, and my Liz from the airport.
You didn’t think it was possible, but my smile just got broader.—I’m really, really, really looking forward to the day of the Grand Prix, but I could not possible care less about who wins. 
These entries were written in a notebook that I bought at Uluru and had with me at various points since then. These are direct from the page, no edit at all.
23 Feb 2002—Uluru
Woke up. Still no stars. Had breakfast. Went to the rock. Walked around it. Went to the cultural center, very cool. Bought crappy souvenirs. Need to take a photography class when I get back.—People on this Way Outback Tour:
Patrick, from Zurich.
Simon, from Taiwan.
Willy, Irish living in London.
Tim, our tour guide, lives in Alice Springs.
Me and Chris. A good group.
24 Feb 2002—Kings Creek Station—Stayed up late last night, talking and feeling nice.
—Rained while we were bivouacking. I had to drag Chris’ heavy ass under cover.
—Woke up, had breakfast, drove to Kings Canyon. Great place. Great pictures, I think. Then we came back, had lunch at Kings Creek Station, where everything was a ripoff, then left for Alice Springs. Managed to check my e-mail at a reststop. Nothing too greatly interesting, but it was an odd experience to be looking at pictures of Bethany and I at her winter formal while at a reststop in the middle of the Australian Outback.
—Almost at Alice. Got a ton of sun today. Gonna be red, I know.
—This is a vast and beautiful land.
9 Mar 2002—Bonanza en route to Logan
It’s a beautiful day. The clouds are thin and listless, the air is just under warm and sweet. The first flowers are peeking out from behind rocks. It’s a beautiful day, but I wish it wasn’t. A day like this makes it hard to want to leave. Light so pure makes me think of Liz and her glowing skin in summer, my sisters shimmering jet-black hair, cool spring days playing golf with dad in sweaters, the course still a light, undecided gray under blue skies before its green spring transformation. I wish it were bone-chillingly cold, dark, sleeting. Then I could curse this place where I live and say ‘I can’t wait for the Mediterranean.’ But, alas, my thoughts are firmly in the here and now, entrenched and churning over things like love and its truth, truth in general, family, friends, balance, the future, truth, truth, truth. A day like this makes one call Tom Wolfe into question: ‘Why can’t I go home again? Look at it! Who wouldn’t want to come home again?’ I think about this awhile, then decide that it’s not the home that’s the problem. The home will always be there. The home that one pines away for is almost static. Things do change, of course, but it’s still home. The problem is oneself after being gone. People told me that all the time, before I left: ‘You’re going to change so much.’ And I nodded, and I said ‘Yea.’ Occasionally I’d try and be clever and say ‘That’s the idea,’ and throw back a big smile, then usually walk away. I know I’m different now, I can feel it, and I’ll be even more different when I get back. I will go home again, some day in June, and it’ll be roughly the same home, but there’s no chance that I’m going to look at it in the same way. In effect, I’m not going to go home, I’m going to go to a place that I’ve never seen before.
11 Mar 2002—First impressions of Nice (already published) and Mme. Mercier
She’s a funny old woman. Shes’ not particularly frail, not particularly large or small and not particularly outgoing or shy. She reflects the great compromise of the city around her. We talked yesterday, my first day, about her daughter, who died of a disease whose name I did not catch. Her pictures are everywhere. Either she was loved much and is now missed on a daily basis (a la ‘Music I Heard,’ by Conrad Aiken) or she was never loved enough and it took disease/death to realize that. I wonder.
Addition: I wrote that my first day, but, having come to know Mme. Mercier very well, and having seen her love for just about everything in the world except politicians and bad milk, I must conclude that is was the former hypothesis. She’s an extremely kind woman, and must have been an excellent mother in her day. I cannot imagine her children receiving anything but the most love possible in the world.