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| The Burgess Shale 20 most recent entries |
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Off to Pinewoods we go! Back Saturday. 2 comments | post a comment
A quick break from all-Italy-all-the-time to plug Virtuality, the Fox summer pilot from Ron Moore (the Battlestar Galactica guy). I watched the two-hour pilot this weekend, and was shocked to find myself watching a really excellent hard SF series that owes a debt to the ideas of Arthur C. Clarke and the crew dynamics of the first third of Alien. It might legitimately be called slow or dense, but I'd rather say "thought-provoking" and "unhurried." I frankly expected the sort of "Holodeck-done-gone-wrong!" fluff I got so sick of on Star Trek; instead, the virtual reality aspects offer thoughtful, fascinating social extrapolation (there are at least two really solid social SF ideas in the pilot), and when things do go wrong, they go wrong in ways that a) emerge naturally from the idea of immersive VR and b) set up some very interesting mysteries.
 Tuesday, June 30 - Rome It turns out there are things other than the Laocoön in the Vatican Museums. Since they were unexpectedly closed on Monday (thank you, Saints Peter and Paul), ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} adfamiliares and I were forced to take a whirlwind tour — only three hours, which counts as "whirlwind" for the Vatican Museums — on Tuesday morning, before we caught our train to Florence. It's strange to be surrounded on every side by priceless things you've been seeing all your life in books, things that launched whole artistic movements — I felt privileged, and a little overwhelmed. The crowds were like a river in most parts of the museums, but we danced pretty deftly through them, and saw everything we'd hoped to see (if not as thoroughly as we might've liked).( Masterpieces within! ) All my Vatican photos are up in my Vatican Museum Flickr set. As I upload more sets, they'll show up in my Italy 2009 collection. 3 comments | post a comment
 Tuesday, June 30 - Rome I got teary-eyed when I saw the Laocoön. Couldn't move. It's one of the most beautiful things ever created by humans, in my book — muscular and graceful, solid and dynamic, perfectly geometrically balanced. It somehow manages to be bitterly tragic and breathtaking at the same time, poised right on the cusp between human pain and aesthetics. And it utterly refutes the idea that art and the fantastic can't coexist, since it's really just a standard scene from a monster movie (Attack of the Killer Sea Serpents!). This was a bit of a pilgrimage for me — I'd wanted to see it for years and years — and as tour groups came and went like surf in front of me I stood in the Laocoön's alcove in the sunny Cortile Ottagono, smiling and crying. If you don't know the story: The fellow with the beard is Laocoön, the priest who warned Troy about the Trojan horse ("Beware of Greeks bearing gifts"). Even though Troy ignored the warning, Athena (or perhaps Apollo, or Poseidon) sent sea snakes to kill him and his sons as punishment. The sculpture was dug up in 1506 near Nero's Domus Aurea (which we'd tromped all over the day previous), and it quickly became the very first acquisition of the Vatican Museums. For a long time, Laocoön's right arm was missing; it was displayed with a 16th-century replacement, heroically outstretched and holding a loop of the serpent at bay. Then, in 1906, his (possibly) real arm was found in a marble yard: bent backwards, submissive, still straining but hopeless. ( More worshipful photos under here. ) 1 comment | post a comment
 Mozzarella tasting plate for two at Ōbikā. It is possible, it turns out, to find mediocre Italian food in Italy, but even without trying very hard you're mostly going to eat food that will still make you salivate a week after you get home. Only by walking a zillion miles a day did we avoid gaining twenty pounds. Here, in no particular order, are our top dining experiences in Italy: ( Snipped for photos! ) 1 comment | post a comment
I'm returning to normal after the whirlwind grandeur of Italy: a rag soaked in glory, then wrung out. But the imprint lingers — I feel more spacious, somehow, as though my chest is filled with all the vaulted spaces of all the cathedrals we were so small in. I'm bigger on the inside. Fragments of gold leaf and mosaic glint in the corners of my closed eyes. I think being in a foreign country, where I had to strain to capture meaning, where I could never just bumble along complacently but had to be always alert, made me more permeable to the avalanche of images and sensations we experienced. I feel tattooed, in layers, like a palimpsest.
Sunday, June 28 - Rome
Home safe, but nearly not quite. Thanks to some bad timing, too much breakfast, and a very cautious driver on the Leonardo Express, the ticket gate was closed when we got to the airport. (At Fiumicino, there is a separate ticket line for each flight.) The woman there couldn't log into Delta's system to print our boarding passes, so she sent us to security with nothing more than the wrinkled itinerary we'd printed out before leaving. One laid-back security dude and a lot of Amazing Race-style running later, we made it to the gate, got scolded for being late, and joined the back of the boarding line. We ended up with a row of three seats all to ourselves, and had quite a nice flight, with tiny ice cream cones.
I suspect something uncanny is going on at the Medici Chapel. From without, it's a pleasant terra-cotta-tiled hump, a gnome's observatory or a Super Mario hill. Inside, it's a vertiginous octagonal marble room done in the colors of the sea and old blood (as though designed by the followers of some ancient briny fish-god), above a crypt filled with dozens of relics in cases of gold and glass and inlaid stone: the gold-chased fingerbone of a saint, a snippet of Mary's tunic, splinters of the True Cross, chunks of the pillar at which Jesus was scourged, part of the shaft of one of Saint Sebastian's arrows, a thorn from the Crown of Thorns. In a small corridor to one side stand two unfinished victory statues by a student of Michelangelo, and wriggling out of the neck-holes of the empty suits of armor are, on the left, a fat worm with a lion's head, looking very much like the chestburster from Alien, and on the right a blind, suckered tentacle. Then, in the next room along, the personification of Night reclines next to Day — but Day's face is a blank smear of marble slumping into his beard.
Greetings from the last capital of Rome. Ravenna is a much quieter town than Rome or Florence — you get the sense that the Byzantine Empire washed over it in the 5th century, depositing mosaics on all the churches like tidewrack, then thihngs pretty much stopped happening here. (Except for Dante being exiled — and eventually buried — here. In his mausoleum hangs a lamp fueled in perpetuity by Florentine oil, sent by the city in penance for exiling him.) The mosaics are truly beautiful, though, and well worth the visit. I'll post pictures, but pictures can't do justice to the feeling of being surrounded by, wrapped in, embedded in chips of brilliant color and radiant gold, as bright today as they were 1400 years ago. Seen close, the chips of glass break up into crude cartoons and chunky Halloween masks, but as you step back they become graceful and fluid, and the mosaic faces become as expressive as painted ones. In the Basilica San Francesco, where they raised the floor several times due to flooding, you can peer through a dark hole below the altar to see the original mosaic floor. By dropping a 50 cent piece into a slot, you can illuminate it to see the goldfish swimming among the pillars.
 Florence from the top of Il Duomo, looking towards the Arno.
I sing the praises of the caffè shakerato: espresso shaken with ice, like a Bond martini, and poured into a martini glass with a foam of pure coffee on top. I sing the praises of Coca-Cola made with sugar instead of corn syrup. I sing the praises of the bus system of Rome, with its signs at every stop showing every stop that every bus that stops there has made and will make, and when that bus starts and stops running, and (sometimes) when the next bus is due, and how many stops away it is. I sing the praises of public springs, spilling endless streams of cold pure water from the corners of buildings and taps in the street, for filling water bottles or cooling hot hands and faces.
The Medici coat of arms — some number of red balls, usually six, on a field of gold, with the chief ball blue and covered in fleurs-de-lis once they got permission from King Louis XI to French it up — is everywhere in Florence. On statues, on street corners, on buildings, on cathedral ceilings. As one Medici contemporary put it, "He has emblazoned even the monks' privies with his balls." But the Medici were the folks who jump-started the Renaissance, discovering Michelangelo and sponsoring da Vinci, so I can't be too hard on them. Michelangelo designed the Medici Chapel, whose dome fills the window beside me, and all over the city shops and souvenir carts sell pictures of David's penis (sometimes with sunglasses).
We are just arrived in Florence, where the internet flowers in the hotel rooms. Hooray! I just saw the bells of San Lorenzo ringing outside the window — heard them, too, but they are right there to see, and with a good arm I could probably hit the bells with a rock. Watching them jounce around is surprisingly fun. There are four, swinging at different rates and sounding with different tones. The red-tiled dome of the Medici Chapel is perfectly framed in the window from my seat, here at the laptop desk.
We are alive and well in Rome. I'm posting from a little internet-enabled bookstore in Trastevere, just down the winding, terra cotta-toned streets from our tiny hotel by the Tiber. Rome is astonishing — every street is a museum, every building photogenic. Hard to decide whether I'm overwhelmed or exalted. So much to say, but later, when I can do it justice.
I put in the garden today, weeding an infinite number of weeds in a light mist of rain before planting sungold cherry tomatoes, chocolate cherokees, five basil plants, and parsley. (The mint from two years ago is doing just fine, thanks, despite its encounter with a lawnmower earlier this spring.) I marked the height of the little tomatoes on their bamboo supports with a Sharpie, so we can watch them grow.
My Italian phrasebook: Caffè freddo. Cappuccino. Shakerato. Caffè macchiato. Marocchino. Caffè della casa. 3 comments | post a comment
You know what you get to do when you're traveling to Europe in a week?
For our first few nights, we will be staying at the Hotel Domus Tiberina, steps from the Isola Tiberina, the only island in the Tiber, formed around the body of the tyrant Tarquinius Superbus, who was drowned there in 510 BC*. A shrine to Aesculapius was built on the island in the 3rd century BC, because a snake jumped off a boat and swam to it, and the basilica of Saint Bartholemew was built on top of it in 998. The northern bridge has been in continuous operation since 62 BC. Deep time, baby. * Caution: May be folk tale. 2 comments | post a comment
Look! I am up at 8:30, so I can go to Baltimore and see a baseball game.
Futurama's back, baby. |
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excited
impressed
enthralled
hungry
pensive
sleepy