American Pastoral #9

Walker Evans, Moundville, Alabama

Tacoma cop killer’s house, night stake-out

West Point cadets listen to Obama

Cairo Illinois, 2009

Windsor Hotel, New York, circa 1880

Screentest by Andy Warhol, 1964

Goodyear blimp, 1938

Empire State Building, NYC

Golden Gate Bridge, 1937

Ed Ruscha

Rural homeless ranch, San Luis Obispo, Ca.

Long abandoned black school, North Carolina

Teabagger convention, Pennsylvania

Looking for work, unemployed, NYC

Harlem

Philip Guston

Kenneth Noland, 1924-2010

James Turrel

Miami art show

Voters in Massachusetts reflected the national mood in rejecting the business-as-usual choice of an institutionally chosen replacement for Senator Kennedy and installed instead truck-driver given to contradictory words – a real politician ! – while Obama recoiled and took a populist turn on that opportune target of the moment, bankers.  The stock market in response took a dive, and the Supreme Court, ruling in a matter which could have led to a narrow decision decided instead to open the floodgates of corporate spending on election campaigns.  Perhaps this will result in a new law stating explicitly that corporations are not “persons” and do not have the same Constitutional rights and protection of real persons.  Or perhaps it will result in a while in a government 100% of, by, and for the corporations which in fact govern a massive amount of the national political culture (and most other culture) already.

Jasper Johns, Flag

The Pleasure of Friends (#1)

Above photographs by William Farley

As an habitual traveler, someone who’s lived in a long line of cities and towns (and country), each long enough to call it “home,” I have an equally long string of friends spotted around the world.  Most of them, settled unlike me, have lives like most people centered on a cluster of nearby family, friends, work associates.  In consequence it’s me who does most of the maintaining in these scattered relations – I write, sometimes I probably seem to badger, I drop by once in a while, sometimes in a very long while.

Owing to the tenuousness of these relationships I have the pleasure of being surprised  – seeing how we change with age, or in some cases, seem not to.  Some of these friends are artists, or writers, or otherwise creative sorts.  Some not.   In the long absences they do things I don’t get to see, so visiting often includes the joy of seeing what they’ve been up to – photos or paintings, or things written, or films made.  It is I think a kind of pleasure that those who see them more often don’t get – a little explosion of happiness in seeing the pent up work of a friend.  Kind of like an little emotional earthquake, but positive.

So I’m going to start a little series here, posting some things gathered from friends – maybe old, maybe new, but tracings of their lives through their work.

The above photographs are by William Farley, whose website has more information on his work.  I met Bill long ago, we both don’t seem to recall – maybe 1980 or so, and probably through our mutual friend Rick Schmidt (of Feature Length Films for Used Car Prices fame).    At the time I was living in the Bay Area and I’d see Bill once in a while at a screening, or at one of Rick’s croquette games.  I can’t say Bill and I were close friends, but we were friends.  He was a filmmaker, at the time one of the Bay Area’s better known independents, with a nose for what was going on in the cultural world.  One of his earlier films had Whoopie Goldberg back before she became well known.  Since I left the San Francisco area back in 1993 we didn’t really correspond, though here and there I kept in touch, and if I recall properly the last time I was through – some 5 or 6 years ago – I went by his offices down on a pier on the Bay.  Recently he sent me a commissioned video piece he did on an older artist there, Elaine Badgely Arnoux.  It was very nicely done, though of course constrained a bit by the purposes of the commission.  Along the way he also pointed me to the above photographs, a series titled Fog@Night.  I found these quite stunningly beautiful, and it made me wonder why in the past he hadn’t done his own camera work on his films. (He had done so on some earlier short works.)   And looking at these, I find myself wishing to see a film of such imagery.  Something without a story, simply tonality and mood.   How about it, Bill?

You can see all the photographs in this series and other information about William Farley at his website.  High quality prints are available for sale if interested.

Seasonal Stuffings

I seem to have forgotten to post this, but I guess its seasonal nature is still appropo, so post away we will.

Aurora Borealis

Being not a Christian, nor a rabid consumer, it’s my habit to slip into hibernation around now, and to re-emerge once the Gregorian calendar’s New Year’s sillinesses have subsided and life resumes its more usual patterns.  Days of obligatory happiness, be they these, or national markers, or saintly ones, all tend to make people more cantankerous – lemmings in flying silver sardine cans, ski slopes crammed, roads jammed, all in the name of dubious requisite celebrations for things few believe in, producing errant gifts and angry family get togethers.   I’ll pass.

[Note: there's a new post up for my daughter, Clara, on her blog. ]

Despite the bah humbug above,

Boas Festas e Feliz Ano Novo, Clara !

Mala non solo Italia

On Saturday, December 5th, there was a demonstration in Rome, against Silvio Berlusconi, 73, the head of government.  He’s also head of many other things, including the media – both state owned and private – including television and some newspapers and major book publisher Mondadori.  And one wonders what else.  He is also Italy’s richest man.  In the past year he’s been mired in one scandal after another, with his wife, former show-girl/actress, Veronica Lario, 53,  leaving him with acrid comments about his compulsion for younger girls,  for whom he threw parties at his huge villa on Sardinia, inviting teenage girls from around Italy, and bringing them in on state transportation.   The papers had recently found him to be “friends” with a 17 year old Neapolitan girl (at the time they met), Noemi Letizia, which seemed to be the final straw for Veronica.

Veronica Lario, almost ex-wife of Berlusconi

Noemi Letizia, Silvio’s “friend”, now 18

The organizers of the anti-Berlusconi demonstration of yesterday, initiated over Facebook, claimed nearly a million participants; the police said 90,000.  Rather a discrepancy there, and likely somewhere in-between (a large in-between) lies the truth.  Or perhaps we should say that between the lies, perhaps there is the truth.

Gaspare Spatuzza

In the last days a Mafia pentito, Gaspare Spatuzza, in the context of the trial of a Berlusconi associate, Marcello Dell’Utri,  fingered Dell’Utri and Berlusconi as persons abetting the Mafia, who in turn aided Berlusconi politically (Sicily votes heavily for him).  [For those not in the know, Berlusconi has had numerous court dates himself, all so far smudged by the curious nature of Italian law.] Such charges have swirled around Berlusconi for years.  But then they also swirled around former “Socialist” premiere Craxi as well as former “Christian Democrat” Andreotti.  To say it’s an old story.  Currently Berlusconi, a former cruise ship crooner,  is attempting to have a new law passed by his Parliament (with a majority of Popolo delle Libertà, formerly Forza Italia, his own personal party, in collusion with Bossi’s La Lega Nord and Gianfranco Fini’s Alleanza Nazionale, formerly the MSI, the surviving fascist party) which would curtail the statute of limitations on laws which might otherwise put Silvio behind bars.  To say the head of the Italian government, in keeping with recent – and ancient  – Italian tradition, is deep in sordid matters.  A reading of Italian history, from the Roman Empire, to the Papacy, to the Renaissance, and modern history all betray the same (old) story, and a passing acquaintance with the language(s) of the peninsula confirm a vibrant and rich vocabulary of insult, anger, hatred, and violence, all of which surface in everyday reality in la bella Italia.   They’ve had 2000 plus years to hone these qualities to perfection.

-    Ehi, testa di cazzo!
-    Che cazzo fai?
-    Tuo cugino è un paraculo
-    Vaffanculo, fai solo cazzate
-    Porca puttana, mi hanno fregato sul resto della spesa
-    Sai dire solo stronzate
-    Quello te l’ha messo in culo
-    Me ne vado. Mi sono rotto il cazzo
-    Lì sono tutti dei coglioni
-    Ma va a cagare, stronzo
-    Quante pippe mentali ti fai!
-    Quella non c’ha le palle per farlo
-    Mi hanno fatto girare i coglioni stamattina
-    Con i tuoi soldi mi ci pulisco il culo!
-    Non mi frega nulla di quello che pensi

Paolo Uccello’s Battle of San Romano

One of my favorite paintings, before which I have spent many hours at the National Gallery in London, as well as making tracings, a failed pastel, and sketched a kind of installation work centered on it.  It is one of a triptych of works, one other being in Firenze at the Uffizi, and the other one in Paris, at the Louvre.  This one is in the best condition, though the top section was lopped off somewhere along the line.  It was made in celebration of a battle which supposedly the Fiorentine forces won, but that is a lie – it was more a tie.  Very Italian that.

Andrea Della Robbia

Scissors in convent wall, Ravenna

Along with the travails besetting Silvio, in the last weeks there’s also been the case of Amanda Knox, 22,  young American girl caught up in another trial, for murder, in the lovely town of Perugia.  In brief, her roommate, an English girl, Meredith Kercher, 21, was found, throat slit and quite dead, two years ago.  Evidence, circumstantial and otherwise, pointed to a  22 year old Ivory Coast resident in Perugia, Rudy Guede, who fled to Germany, was caught and is already imprisoned following a “fast track” trial at his request.  It also pointed to Amanda’s Italian boyfriend of the time, Raffaele Sollecito, now 25, and Amanda herself.  Attempts of a cover-up, an apparent staged break-in, false accusations, curious behaviors on Amanda’s part, contradictory alibis and DNA samples all went into the mix, along with a scandal-minded Italian press combined to create a fine circus out of this.  This week Amanda was found guilty and sentenced to 26 years imprisonment, a judgment promptly complained about by the US press and by Senator Cantwell of Washington State from which Amanda hails, which found the Italian legal system wanting by comparison to the American one.

Amanda behind bars

Inside Italy, the past week also saw the former head of RAI, the Italian state television and radio system, and current President of LUISS (Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali), Pier Luigi Celli, publish a letter to his son in the newspaper La Repubblica in which he advised him, following his impending graduation from university, to depart Italy for more fertile grounds for his future.   This naturally begot a mixed response and a week of Italian newspaper and television discourse on the fine art of navel gazing.  There were those who, in typical Italian fashion, complained that the advice was idiotic since Celli was well-placed to find his son a good job – patronage – and he could count on doing well in nice corrupted Italia.  They didn’t say it that way but that’s what they meant.  Others commiserated, lamenting the frozen slow-motion quality of Italian society, where getting ahead is a matter more of who you know than what you know, and where the works are gummed up with low-level corruptions for getting your plumbing fixed, the post-office lines are legendary, and high-level corruption – like Silvio’s – merely amplifies that at the bottom.

Craxi and the crooner, 1984

[Craxi, the head of the Socialist Party and the former Premier, died in exile in Tunisia.  He was the mentor of Silvio Berlusconi, the current Premier.]

Some years ago, in 1993, having moved to Italy on my 50th birthday to carry out a long-time wish to live there, I quickly, through no particular effort on my part – basically going to some parties while riding in the short coat-tails of All the Vermeers in New York – lined up a producer and made a film there.   The producer was Enzo Porcelli, who was well-known as making more adventurous films, having done some with Bertolucci, Godard, and others, so he claimed, as well as B-grade schlock.  His ride at the time was Gianni Amelio, who was then making L’America.  He met me at a party and said, having heard I made films cheaply, he’d like to work with me.  I took the bait, and a few months later we were in production, working my way, unheard of in Italy: no script.  For a week we shot with the crew he suggested – a soundman, his assistant, a production guy.  I was doing camera on Aaton 35mm.  These guys were “pros” so I was told.  That meant they took boxes and boxes of crap to work with, when I just wanted the camera and the tape recorder and mike.  They dumped the stuff in the middle of my sets; they took a break now, a 2 hour lunch then.  After a week I stopped the production and said if we were to continue with these guys, we’d never come in on budget.  I fired the lot of them, including one alleged actress who froze like a deer in headlights as soon as the camera turned on.  Her Calabrian boyfriend came storming to my apartment/production office, pounded on the door, intimidated my production assistant into tears, and stood an inch from my face, announcing “sono Calabrese” which was supposed to send me quivering in fear to the floor.  I don’t recall what I said, but it was something like, “get the fuck outta here”, and he did, and I never heard anything more from our pumped up would-be hood.  His claim to apparent fame was he’d had a small role – virtual extra – in an Antonioni film.

Alberto Sordi, in Mafioso by Alberto Lattuada

The production resumed some months later, with a crew I chose – Theo Eshetu, an Ethiopian who had lived a long time in Rome,  a video-artist, and had never recorded sound.  He was my recordist and did fine.  Some guy who lived in San Francisco and wanted to work with me came over and was assistant (didn’t work out too well has he was hyper PC and found my foul mouth not to his tastes; from my side he basically didn’t know too much what he was doing); my production manager was an American-Italian living in Italy, Eve Silvestri.  Working my way, we cranked out the film fine, editing for the first time electronically for me, on an Avid, quite new in Italy at the time.  I was helped by my friend Edoardo Albinati, a writer now rather well-known, on some scenes where I wrote and he translated, or I suggested what I wanted and he wrote. The film was finished shooting in autumn, 1993, and we went into editing I think in December.  A week later I requested of Porcelli that he fire the editor, or more exactly the chain-smoking Italian Avid technician running the computer to my decisions, because I felt he didn’t really understand how the Avid system worked.  Porcelli declined, and we went on, and finished editing relatively fast, though Amelio’s film kept needing my hard-disk space, as he did endless long takes and hogged more gigabytes than there were at hand.   I tried to get the first take and for the most part that was it.   In February the edit was done, and it was time to mix, and Porcelli’s promise that there was a digital suite in Rome proved false after a visit to Fellini’s favorite sound studio on via Margutta,  where they’d said they’d have it soon.  In Italian that means in a few years if you are lucky.  I then shopped around and found a place in Vienna that could do it – I just needed to get the sound on external HDs and bring along the EDL (Edit Decision List – a computerized notation of all the elements of the film, where they went, and what had or had not been done to them).   We set a mix date, and when it was time to leave for Vienna Porcelli’s editor didn’t know how to generate an EDL or get the sound on the HDs.   In the same manner we missed two other mix-dates at other places in Europe, and I began to lose my patience.  I informed Porcelli (the name means “little pigs”) I’d set up a new date, now in July, and if we missed that, I’d take my name off the film.  Thus, in that month – with a Venice festival deadline looming – I took off for a sound studio in London, with the HDs, and five days scheduled for the mix.  Properly done this should have meant about a half-day loading the whole EDL into their system, and then commencing with the mix.  Instead, courtesy of Porcelli’s dear editor whom I’d asked be fired, we spent 2 and a half days searching for mislabeled sound, synching some places, and patching in lots of missing sounds from an EFX library.  I got 2 days to actually do the mix.  Porcelli complained I was taking too much time, and I exercised my Italian as above.

Photo montage by Theo Eshetu

On delivery of the finished film, I was due my final bit of pay, which in any event was very modest, but which I needed.  Enzo issued what in Italian is called a ricatto, basically a little slice of extortion, and told me he’d give me half my pay then, and then I’d get the other half after the Venice festival if I didn’t say anything bad about him or his production company, Alia film; otherwise he’d give it to a lawyer to sue me.   Playing the Italian film press for PR, he had previously planted stories that there were “problems” during the production, on the old “any PR is good PR” angle.   Arriving in Venice, Porcelli lurked around the edges of things while Eliana Miglio, the lead actress, and I and the others played the publicity game.  At the press conference I was immediately asked about “the problems” in the production, to which I replied that I couldn’t answer any questions because my producer would not pay me if I said anything bad.  End of press conference.

Andrea, Eliana Miglio, Paolo Glisenti (son, mother, husband)

The film played at the festival, and while a few far left critics gave it a nice review, the others were negative to scathing.  The film was called Un a te, uno a me, e uno a Rafaelle,  a line drawn from an early newspaper item at the beginning of the Mani Pulite scandal, in play at the time.  Had the film dealt with dirty doings from higher ups, which is what the scandal was about – corruption in the governing party, kick-backs, etc. -  instead of what I did, dwelling on the little everyday corruptions which make those at the top seem “normal,” I am pretty sure they would have lapped it up.  But I suggested it wasn’t the thugs at the top – Craxi and all – who made Italy dirty, it was Italian life itself that made such corruptions inevitable.  This was all done in a light-handed manner, a kind of comedy of manners, though there was one serious scene in which a character vaguely patterned on Raul Gardini internally presents to himself and the viewer the kinds of arguments that were used by people to justify their behaviors; in a subsequent scene the character shoots himself.  Gardini was a very big, well-known, dashing businessman, who ran an Italian yacht in the America’s Cup, but was deeply mired in the myriad scandals of Mani Pulite.  He committed suicide, which shocked the nation.  Perhaps my glancing intimations of this cut too deeply at the time for many.   Many of those critical were writers who were very pleased with my less-than-happy critiques of my America, but were disturbed when I brought the same eye to bella Italia. They tended to say I didn’t really know Italy well (even if Edoardo had written the most biting of the commentary).  It depends on whose bull is being gored it seems.

Raul Gardini celebrating a yachting victory

On the contractual date that Porcelli was supposed to cough up the balance of my delayed paycheck, nothing was forthcoming – nothing surprising about this in Italy.  I wrote him then and said we had a few choices:  we could go to court, and we’d both be dead before it was resolved; we could go to the press, and he being Italian, and Italy being Italy, he’d win in any such lopsided contest; or I could request that RAI 3 audit his production, which they had been led to believe was budgeted at $750,000 but of which only their $250,000 part,  plus another 30K from my leading star’s husband’s production company had actually been present.  Little Pigs promptly paid up the remaining sum.

I’ve been told in the years since that Uno a te has screened many times on Rai 3, something, so I was told, that doesn’t happen unless the audience figures are high.   A while back I took a look at the banged up DVD copy – from a VHS tape – I have of it, and it’s not a bad film at all.  And all too prescient about Italy today.

Strozzapreti sauce for pasta

One of my original reasons for moving to Italy was that in the US in the 80’s I’d met a good number of young Italians, who had left to try their luck in America.  I was curious how they could leave a place so beautiful, where every handful of kilometers can unveil a lovely small town, crammed with thoughtful architecture and wonderful art.  And the food ! It was hard to see leaving that behind for McDonalds and Burger King, American strip cities, and Las Vegas.  Admittedly New York has its energy, the West its vast and imposing landscapes, and the small town here and there has its charms, and cities like San Francisco or New Orleans their unique flavors.  But still, to leave Italy for more than a vacation seemed at the time a puzzle.   Five years in Rome, living “parallel” to the culture – to say I did what I could to side-step the more obvious unpleasant qualities of the place – helped me understand the compulsion to depart.

As lovely as it is, Italy is ossified, frozen in its corrupted culture, and when young and full of energy it offers little meaningful space for doing things.  Trivial things, yes – you can party, goof off, have “fun” but in an aimless manner; drag out university for years (because there’s no job when you leave), and live with your parents (because there’s no money).  If your sights are aimed elsewhere, what is on offer is a long, and lacking the proper connections, perhaps terminal waiting line.   From the most mundane of things – getting that plumbing problem fixed – to the more demanding, Italy offers an endless compendium of difficulty.  Enough to bludgeon even the most optimistic and cheery into a deadening submission.

The Italian motto is “Fidarsi è bene; non fidarsi è meglio.” To trust is good; not to trust is better.

To live one’s life under such a banner is to consign oneself to a permanent unhappiness, with fear that even a best friend might slip the knife in at some opportune moment.  Et tu, Brute? Unfortunately this motto is all too real in Italy, where nothing is to be trusted, one must keep an eye on everything, payments due must be coerced after a dance of attempted cheating is used almost by instinct and habit.  So while the evening’s ritual passeggiata seems full of social pleasure and joy, greetings with hugs and cheek kisses, in reality it is a social obligation, the daily wasting of an hour or two, mandated lest one be deemed anti-social, a solitario.  In Italy solitude is condemned as a mode of hell and having no friends is tantamount to being exiled from the community.

Passeggiata

As hard as I am on bella Italia, I am not alone.  Like the young people I met in the 80’s, and others since, many have voted with their feet.  My wife Marcella, from Matera in Basilicata, says she does not wish to return to Italy to live, at least for the moment.  Quite recently her younger sister, Francesca, moved to try her luck in Ireland, having done a 3 month residency there and finding it more to her liking and more open to opportunities than her native land.   And my friends Eliana and Paolo tell me they are thinking of moving to Paris, and they more or less have suggested to Andrea that when his schooling is done (he’s studying acting at the Centro Sperimentale, the Italian national film school) he’d likely do well to move along elsewhere.   And a wonderful musician, Christian Ravaglioli, who we met near Ravenna last summer, visiting New York City in the last months, tells us he’d like to stay, but lacking a work permit must return.  Mr Celli, apparently, is not alone in his glum view of Italy in these days.  All the wonderful cuisine and wine, the sunny skies, the gracious architecture and spectacular art somehow fall short of providing the full needs of life.

As unhappy as it seems I make Italy sound, I think my own country is in far worse straits, as the readers of these pages know.  We are more corrupt and our corruption is more dangerous for our power.  And we are more dispirited as a people, ground under the feet of the corporate powers which now dictate our national life.   And somehow the poisons fed to us have paralyzed us no less than the malaise afflicting Italy has frozen their society.

Una mattina mi son svegliato,
o bella, ciao! bella, ciao! bella, ciao, ciao, ciao!
Una mattina mi son svegliato,
e ho trovato l’invasor.
(che è morto per la libertà)

O partigiano, portami via,
o bella, ciao! bella, ciao! bella, ciao, ciao, ciao!
O partigiano, portami via,
ché mi sento di morir.

E se io muoio da partigiano,
(E se io muoio sulla montagna)
o bella, ciao! bella, ciao! bella, ciao, ciao, ciao!
E se io muoio da partigiano,
(E se io muoio sulla montagna)
tu mi devi seppellir.

E seppellire lassù in montagna,
(E tu mi devi seppellire)
o bella, ciao! bella, ciao! bella, ciao, ciao, ciao!
E seppellire lassù in montagna,
(E tu mi devi seppellire)
sotto l’ombra di un bel fior.

Tutte le genti che passeranno,
(E tutti quelli che passeranno)
o bella, ciao! bella, ciao! bella, ciao, ciao, ciao!
Tutte le genti che passeranno,
(E tutti quelli che passeranno)
Mi diranno «Che bel fior!»
(E poi diranno «Che bel fior!»)

«È questo il fiore del partigiano»,
(E questo è il fiore del partigiano)
o bella, ciao! bella, ciao! bella, ciao, ciao, ciao!
«È questo il fiore del partigiano,
(E questo è il fiore del partigiano)
morto per la libertà!»

American Pastoral #8

WTC 9/11 ceremony, 2009

Disney pigments

Jacko’s house

Marietta, Ohio

Ralph Stanley

Columbus, Nebraska

City Hall, Los Angeles

Harry Callahan, Chicago

Diebenkorn

Truro, Edward Hopper

Mafia club, Bensonhurst

Roy Cohn

Stonewall bar, Greenwich Village, NYC

Stahl house, Los Angeles

Jacko’s end of This Is It tour

Beverly Hills Hotel

Alexis de Toqueville

The stories we tell ourselves are what a culture is, for better or worse.  Each nation or cultural body tells itself its own stories, largely the ones which it desires to tell itself, though this is not always a happy story.  Where de Toqueville imagined a tyranny of the majority as the end point of America, curiously we have arrived in a quite different place.  While in many trivial ways he was right – our popular culture exemplifies this – politically he was wrong, perhaps because he could not foresee the bifurcation of America into an urban vs rural experiment, in which political power in the most forceful legislative branch, the Senate, would be concentrated into the hands of representatives of rural America, whose values are in large part antithetical to the vast majority of Americans who live in urban areas.  Thus Senators Baucus, Nelson, Imhofe, and others of the sparsely settled mid-west and West are able to derail any legislation not to their liking – such as the current health care reform, now mangled beyond any real reform and surely to be moderated still further by the Senate, or measures to limit global warming gasses.   So for now, we suffer a tyranny of two minorities – that of rural America, representing a small fraction of our population, and that of the ruling class elite, representing an even smaller fraction, those of the 1% who own and control 95% of America’s wealth.

“The executive power in our government is not the only, perhaps not even the principal, object of my solicitude. The tyranny of the legislature is really the danger most to be feared, and will continue to be so for many years to come. The tyranny of the executive power will come in its turn, but at a more distant period.”    Thomas Jefferson

That distant period arrived in the last 10 years or so.

 

Note: there is a new posting on paginasparaclarinha.

Autumnal meander

Nebraska, springtime

My own body makes its minor key announcements:  neck slipped out of alignment recently, nothing unusual in that for some decades; down a few vertebrae lower a slight wrong move results in a sharp stab of pinched-nerve pain.  In the right hip area a chronic grinding sound induces a general very low-key pain in the whole area.   As for the moment it’s cheap, I went to the university hospital to have it checked and confirmed nothing is really wrong,  just normal aging process, the cushioning cartilage and spinal disks shrinking and growing rigid, the youthful padding spent.  The doctor examined me a bit, pushed here and there, and then prescribed a few very mild anti-inflammatory pills, which despite a week of same level pain I failed to take any, but knowing I had an appointment in another week I finally took one just to see if they did anything significant.  Can’t say it did.

The last years – I can’t quite recall how many, but maybe 10 – with each season’s shift  I have often thought to myself that this might be the last spring or autumn I’d be seeing.  This wasn’t prompted by any evident medical symptom or problem, but merely the passage of time.  One’s number comes up.   I don’t imagine at all that I am singular in this thought, only that among those encroaching on life’s last little adventure it seems socially impolitic to speak of such things.   It seems most would prefer to blissfully ignore the matter until a funeral imposes it.

Age spots bloom, the muscle tissue grows slack, skin patterns show dried fractal ribbons, the mind plays games of forgetfulness and – as it runs in the family – the specter of Alzheimer’s looms.  My father lays on his bedsores deep into it at 96.  I have asked Marcella that should this come to me, long before I’d like a jaunt to a deep woods, and a long walk.  Let the animals feed on what muscle tissue’s left, clean the bones.   Unspoken of, it seems as with adolescence, some inward biologic clock goes “tick” and instead of a burst of pubic hair, rambunctious cells setting off acne, a hard-on that can’t stop, and a delirium of aimless energy, there comes with the other end of life another trigger, that sprouts other hair in ears and nose, leaves off that on head, desiccates the skin, droops the dick, slags the muscles, and if you succumb to these dim messages, surely starts to decimate the spirit.  What’s wrong with our culture in its youth-is-all flight from life is that it leaves you unprepared for this, and if you haven’t prepared yourself for it, it’s likely a rude awakening.  In my instance I’ve been in preparation since I was a teenager, so it comes as no surprise, but only as the natural and proper end-game, for which one’s life should have provided the experiences to accept that life is a transitory passage, very finite, and to accept as well that there’s nothing “after.”   As Michael Jackson was going to have it, in his inimitable spectacular way,

In the last months one friend got himself a new hip, and as seems common enough with such things, the rehab part is a bit more than anticipated or the doctor let on.  Invasive surgery on aged bodies is pretty hard.  He’ll probably be walking slower and less.  Another friend, having spent the summer doing hard labor making himself a new basement, sends a note to say he’s feeling every one of his 70 years, in eyes and ears and laboring functions, and admonishes me I better take that long, slow, cross-country shoot ‘n show trip soon, so he can see me again before he (or, I might add, I) slip into the terminal fist of dust.

The crumpled leaves scattered on the sidewalks pointedly remind us of these things, as do the every day realities of bodily degradation.  For myself I’ve been lucky (so far) and aside from a hernia, patched up some years ago with a little slip of some kind of plastic meshing (which, though, now and then bothers when bent tightly, as in my morning yoga), and the minor mangling of my spine incurred by two rear-enders in one year (1977-78), wherein I paid attention to stops signals and the souls behind me didn’t.  Otherwise despite a recent scare about pancreatic cancer (thanks to the wizardry of very high-tech medicine misreading a bit of info), and a very recent prescription for some pills to lower the slightly high blood pressure, I hit the floor every other day to do 80 (sometimes 90, once in a long while 100) push-ups, and the alternate day 80 deep-knee squats.  Plus the yoga, and going by the nice little exercise things that the Koreans smartly place around public places, and do some in-place running, and some waist back and forth thing that is very like skiing.  But each day one feels it.  And any day one of mother nature’s denouements could arrive,  with the probabilities getting higher with each passing autumn.

From Dissonance, an installation work yet unpresented anywhere

My life-time habit of living here and there, moving from one place to another – New York, Berlin, Rome, Lisbon, London, Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, San Francisco, Missoula, Butte, Port Hadlock, Paris, and now Seoul – has left me with a spider-web network of friends dispersed around the globe.  Their lives are largely focused on a long-time home, on their cluster of friends and family, work and play, which for most people is normal.   Their lives center around these places and activities, and I am most often a distant soul in their lives.   I write them more or less often, though long ago learning I’m not likely to get a response unless I pester.   When I do see them, it’s most often because I was on a trip, somewhere nearby, and came to visit.   Not often does it go the other way.  But recently, a few weeks ago, a friend dropped by here, from California via some South Pacific Island, New Zealand, Australia, Kathmandu, Kerala and here from whence he moved along to Estonia.   He and his lady friend are on a world peace march, due to wrap up in South America in January.   (They’ve asked Marcella to make of film of the collected material and if all goes well she’s off to Argentina for some weeks in January.)  We hadn’t seen one another in 4 or 5 or maybe 6 years.   Long enough that the incremental shifts that normally mask the changes in us were unmasked.  While we were both seemingly essentially “the same” – the same humor, the same interests, the same banter between us – and while it did seem as if it were only yesterday, the outward signs of time passed were bluntly visible.  We’d moved along on time’s conveyor belt.   Thus it may be that my sense of autumnal colors is heightened, as I seem to see most my friends only after long gaps, and the gentle fall of the flesh is not ironed out with familiarity.

Presently in last stages of the final editing of Swimming in Nebraska, something shot some 3 years ago in Lincoln.   It’s a work with a lot of technical stuff going on and hence the long editing process.   I suppose it is a kind of essay of some sort, with the vague aim to examine a certain kind of provincialism that comes from those large cultural capital cities I’ve listed earlier, places which usually think themselves the center of the universe, or at least their universe, and think places like Nebraska are to flyover or drive through.  There’s nothing there, they’d say.  Swimming is a gentle retort and a reminder that the same things happen everywhere.  I’ve sent it off to festivals and hope one will take it.

Swimming in Nebraska

We’re all where we always were – here.

American Pastoral #7

WTC steel elements for sale

Walden Pond

George Catlin, Buffalo Hunt

Aurora Borealis, Duluth, Minn.

Jack Kerouac keeping score

Warren Buffett in a bad year, takes a big loss in Omaha

So did Columbus, Nebraska

G7 meets in Pittsburgh

Galveston, Oct 2008

Detroit

Hummer in Afghanistan

Protesting Obama school talk

Let that which stood in front go behind, Let that which was behind
advance to the front. Let bigots, fools, unclean persons, offer new
propositions. Let the old propositions be postponed.

Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892) Reversals Written

Mala Italia

Of human-made landscapes few can compare with the beauties of Italy, from the dramatic lakes and mountains of Piedmont and Lombardy to the rich farmlands and cities of Emilia Romagna, the Marche, Tuscany, Lazio and Compagna.    In these places a mere 50 kilometers separates small cities of extravagant aesthetic qualities – Venezia, Bergamo, Firenze, Lucca, Sienna, Bologna, Ravenna, Pisa to mention but a few – and then the myriad smaller towns perched on mountain tops, their cubist clusters descending briefly down the slopes to be stopped at a once-defensive wall.  Farms flow neatly in an organic patchwork – olives trees, alfalfa, sunflowers, tomatoes, melons and squash, wheat and barley and corn – tumbling down the hillsides and filling the rich valleys.  In the north and central regions despite the dense pressures of the populations crowding it, there is a sense of civility in the architecture and the socially constructed infrastructure which seems to reflect the sublime orderliness of the cloisters which flank most churches, places of meditative quietude.

Accompanying this feast of deeply humanist urban design is a sumptuous cuisine, a true cornucopia of wine, meat and grains and greens the equal of anything on this earth, all extracted from the alluvial soils of these valleys and the slopes of the Appenine mountains.

Simple, rich, varied, and healthy, Italian food is one of the world’s wonders (if only one gets the real thing – the pastiche offered up in most non-Italian places is a pale echo of Italian cooking as found in Italy).

And once upon a time Italy was a volcano of creative energy of all sorts – from Galileo to Michelangelo to Uccello to Veronese to Fibonacci to Caravaggio to Dante to Bramante, Bernini, Brunelleschi, Rossini, Donezetti, Verdi, and…. the list seems endless.  But that time is not now.  Somewhere in the 20th century or before, the energies (with some exceptions, of course) burned out, the broad flame of creativity fluttered and for the most part ceased.   Since World War II, after an initial surge in the late 1940’s and into the 1960’s, Italian culture seemed to collapse with La Dolce Vita.

La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2, L’Eclisse, Teorema, 8 1/2

A rushed modernity – as in many other places – did not mix well with the deep cultural origins of Italy, and these films seemed to hint of a premonition that the sureties of other times would not withstand the sudden shift from a dominantly tribal and agrarian life to the sudden mechanization of the industrial world.  A fashionable, and prescient, alienation marks these works.    In the confusion came severe reactions, though ones steeped in tradition:

Boccioni’s figure moves swiftly forward, though aesthetically it is essentially baroque and rococo, the flourish of form all too clearly expressive of a time several hundred years earlier but in 1913 advancing under the name of Futurism.

As did Il Duce, who sizing up his time, shifted from radical leftist to Fascist in the post World War I turmoil when all of Europe convulsed under the rapid transformations of industrialization, a process which uprooted not only the mechanical organization of society, but also its social order.  The beliefs of the past crumbled in the face of this assault, and in its stead, fertilized by the uncertainty of the time, arose the authoritarian regimes of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Stalin, Salazar, each utilizing the same appeal to historical verities while overturning the social organization of the past.  Italians love a hero, a strong man, a Caesar, and the spectacle which is the natural partner of the dictator.

In the wake of the convulsion of World War 2, Italy, economically prostrate, as with all of Europe, simply struggled to survive.  The late forties and early 50’s saw the neo-realism of Visconti, Di Sica, early Antonioni.  The fifties saw a big shift from bicycles to motorini, the Vespa becoming a symbol of success.  The 60’s saw the motorbike supplanted as status symbol by, of course, the car.   And with it came La Dolce Vita and the celebration of the good life, though in Antonioni’s hands, as Fellini’s, they came with a hang-over.  Something seemed amiss, something spiritual – all the nice things somehow didn’t add up to happiness.

…must confront her social environment. It’s too simplistic to say – as many people have done – that I am condemning the inhuman industrial world which oppresses the individuals and leads them to neurosis. My intention… was to translate the poetry of the world, in which even factories can be beautiful. The line and curves of factories and their chimneys can be more beautiful than the outline of trees, which we are already too accustomed to seeing. It is a rich world, alive and serviceable… The neurosis I sought to describe in Red Desert is above all a matter of adjusting. There are people who do adapt, and others who can’t manage, perhaps because they are too tied to ways of life that are by now out-of-date.^{[2]  Antonioni}

So said the master, who himself got lost in the labyrinth of his new-found element of color, letting his film meander in a fog of ennui.  It was his last film with Monica Vitti as “a number.”  Breaking up is hard to do, as this maker of stripped down soaps knew well.   Lurking in the lush palette which he used were the signals of a nostalgia for an Italy for which he sensed a clear loss.  And despite the logic articulated above, Antonioni in his films demonstrated his own incapacity to adapt.  So much so that riding his fame he went abroad, to England for Blow Up, and America for Zabriskie Point – both misfired aesthetically, the latter terribly so.   His disorientation in the face of the new world reflected closely that of an Italy which could not face its future or its present.   Following the upheavals of the 60’s, Italy fell into the Anni di Piombo (The Years of Lead).

Bologna train station, Aug. 1980

Bombarded from left and right, Italy passed through the 70’s and 80’s in a kind of tormented state, a time riddled with mysterious deaths, oscillating politics and an economy, like much of the rest of the world, in an upward rush of frantic consumerism.  Its premiers – Andreotti, 7 times premier from the 1970’s to 90’s and well-known for Mafia connections, Fanfani, Craxi – were all indicted, tried, and most eluded conviction through technicalities – in the ever-glacial  and often corrupted judicial system of Italy the usual exemption would be that the statute of limitations had expired, and hence, whatever the mountains of evidence and proof, one was absolved.   The current head of state, Silvio Berlusconi follows in this tradition, a multiple indictee, now wallowing in sex scandals wherein his second younger wife left him, accusing him of having a taste for even younger morsels, one of whom is all of 17.  Silvio owns all the broadcast systems, and as head of state, controls (or tries to) the 3 major state-run channels.  He also owns a soccer team, newspapers, publishing houses, and in effect has a strangle-hold on the media in Italy.  He is Italy’s richest man as well.  According to the polls, and to friends of mine who live here, Silvio is popular despite (or perhaps because of) his vulgarity, his authoritarian inclinations, his evidently hot sex life, and his chronic evident illegality – whether screwing underage girls or screwing the justice system.  Of course he does run the media, so the country is told what he’d like it to hear, and little more.   I suspect the truth is less that Silvio is popular than that the broad populace long ago surrendered to pure cynicism when it comes to politics Italian style.  I know not a few people who are planning or hoping to leave bella Italia as soon as they can, along with quite a few who left some time ago.

Italy has had a long history of criminality-as-government, back to the Caesars, Caligula, and to the warring city-states, the history of which is written in the grisly terms outlined by Macchiavelli.  Recently someone told us of a visit to a museum of torture in San Gimignano, where one of the choice items was a barrel in which the punished party sat in shit, head held high, to rot slowly in excrement.   Nearby in Siena, what appear to be basketball hoops adorning the corners of many buildings not so long ago sported human heads.   While such is no longer the fashion, the hanging torso of Mussolini makes clear the tendency is not so old nor really worn out.  It takes only the proper occasion to bring out this taste.   A glance at the Italian equivalent of tabloids shows that on lower levels, violence is a standard recourse.

Gomorrah, film by Matteo Garrone, from book by Roberto Saviano

While we marvel at the extraordinary beauties of the accumulated history of Italy: the massive structures of the Roman empire, the intricate twists and turns of medieval hills towns, the splendid piazzas, architecture and urban planning of the Renaissance, and all the arts which accompanied this long trajectory, we tend to dismiss the underlying  flip-side of a history of astounding violence.  Tourists mill around the statue which marks the place where Bruno was burned at the stake for heresy, thinking little of this event while sipping their wine.

We drive easily up to some hill-top town, its flanks graced with walls, a tall observation tower rising up from its center, and we think little of the logic which placed this town in such a difficult site.  The logic being fear and the need to find a defensible refuge from the marauding warfare below, not to mention the disembowelings, hangings, burnings, and exotic tortures in town, or on the outskirts, little civic lessons in how you (better) behave and whose ass you’d best kiss.   So much for romantic Tuscan hill towns.

In Pasolini’s Teorema the businessman played by Terrence Stamp is seen at the film’s conclusion running crazed through a lunar landscape (shot at the top of the volcano Mt. Aetna in Sicily), seemingly having lost his mind.

Teorema, Pier Paolo Pasolini

If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.    PP Pasolini

In his writings and films, Pasolini pointed to where Italy was going.  He was murdered on Nov 2, 1975, on a patch of sand on the beach near Ostia.   Originally it was said to be a killing from rough trade, the handiwork of Giuseppe Pelosi, a Roman low-class rentboy.  Subsequently, a recantation by Pelosi renewed suspicions that other elements had been in play.  Political ones.  Or perhaps an extortion plot.  Or some thought Pasolini himself orchestrated his own death.

In Ostia there is a new little monument, not quite so awful as the earlier one in front of which I filmed a scene for Uno a te back in 1994.  That one was a squalid piece of  would-be “sculpture” falling apart in the salted acridness of the seaside, ostensibly to honor Italy’s lost poet.   It’s been replaced by this

“Pasolini was what can be termed a citizen-poet. He was concerned with his homeland and expressed his feelings in his work. Patriotic poetry usually comes out of a right-wing tradition and is nationalistic, but Pasolini’s great originality was to be a citizen-poet of the left… He wept over the ruins of Italy but without a hint of rhetoric. He was a modern who used the classical tradition. Rimbaud, the poet of the Paris Commune, the most revolutionary of poets, remained his greatest influence. In the years after the Mussolini dictatorship, he adhered, like many of his compatriots, to an unorthodox brand of communism, that was both Christian and utopian, and these feelings for the poor and underprivileged motivated his own poetry and films.”–Alberto Moravia

American Pastoral #6

Bernie Madoff

Marfa Motel, Texas

Camp Runamuck, Rhode Island

Harney (Squaw Killer) Lake, S.D.

Evangelical “Christian Wealth” Church

I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all
oppression and shame;
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with
themselves, remorseful after deeds done;
I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying,
neglected, gaunt, desperate;
I see the wife misused by her husband–I see the treacherous seducer
of young women;
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be
hid–I see these sights on the earth;
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny–I see martyrs and
prisoners;
I observe a famine at sea–I observe the sailors casting lots who
shall be kill’d, to preserve the lives of the rest;
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon
laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;
All these–All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look
out upon,
See, hear, and am silent.                             Walt Whitman

American Pastoral #5

Merrilville, Ind.

Late July, dog days of summer.   On the news the doldrums arrive, lazy waves on a calm sea.  Beneath this the usual commotion proceeds:  more troops to Afghanistan under cover of new words for old thoughts.  We’ll pacify them, bring them the glories of democracy, build schools.  30 US dead this past month, we aren’t told how many others we killed in this pursuit, and whatever the numbers they’d be false.  Meantime JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs celebrate, having converted the financial panic of autumn into a fiscal killing a mere 8 months later.  Capitalizing on panic, like a gang war, they rubbed out, with some help from Washington, some major competitors.   Now these two sit on the peak of Wall Street, raking in the money and shelling out billions in reward to those inside the game.  Unemployment rises each month, the funny figures jiggled by the statisticians so the official number is 10% for the US, though the real one is likely far closer to more than 20%.   The jobs vanish, and politicians promise renewal, but the work is gone and there’s little real reason to think it’ll be replaced any time soon.   The celebrated shift to a “service economy” has tanked, the 70% of GDP generated by “consumption” suddenly shrivelled with diminished plastic and heightened extortionary interest rates.  Meanwhile Michael is dead, after much distracting hooplah, and now Walter Cronkite, and new news rolls in.   On Washington’s C Street, an alleged Christian retreat for hardpressed politicians turns out to have been a love-nest for errant hypocritical Republican “family values” Senators and Representatives.   Elmer Gantry is America.

Obama slowly tarnishes, as it becomes clear this Knight in burnished bronze is only the best the political system could offer, but it is still inside the system, and the system is gamed by those of the military-industrial complex intent on keeping and expanding America’s imperium, 700 bases – and building – scattered across the globe.  The whiff of Roman decadence becomes a stench. The prison at Bagram in Afghanistan is a political embarassment so the PR machine cranks about the “bad image” and not the actual substance of the matter: that America, in pursuit of its ugly interests, hesitates not to imprison, torture and kill in the most casual of manners.   Caesar would be proud.  The Romans poisoned themselves with lead linings to their aquaducts; we follow suit with plastic water bottles leaching bisphenol-A (BPA) into us, dicking with our hormones.  Our domestic economy wilts as we pour more and more into armaments and money-shufflers, and Obama orates with a silver tongue speaking as his masters dictate.  Were he to actually attempt to take on his commanders in the Pentagon, CIA or Wall Street, he’d be gone as a lynching victim in August.

Marion, Indiana, 1930

On August 6th, 1945, the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb in combat on Hiroshima, Japan