Play of the day*
Posted: July 14, 2012 Filed under: Plays of the days, Wandering in the city Leave a comment
My first oil painting (ever), pictured above.
I picked it up tonight at the second in a 6-week series of still life classes. The whole thing–the painting itself, the class, the charming crowd of diverse participants–is made more magical and meditative because we meet each Monday night to paint at Barnsdall Art Park. Hello Hollyhock.
And who knows? Maybe I’m the next (less psychotic and more symmetrical) Van Gogh?
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*I feel I do not post enough plays of the days. For this, my apologies.+
+Also: I’ve noticed a maudlin trajectory in recent posts. For this I will not apologize. But I do promise more lively, amusing and generally jolly posts in the near future. ^
^But, in my defense, I’ve been listening to a lot of Father John Misty lately. Anyone with a heart would be vulnerable to maudlin prose if that band served as their writerly soundtrack.
Of reentry
Posted: July 12, 2012 Filed under: Mishaps, Wandering in the city 4 Comments
Going home is a complicated affair. Especially if you’ve spent a few weeks roaming the Italian countryside, eating yourself silly, and watching your toes through the clear waters of the Adriatic float up to the horizon line and dip back down with each lulling wave.
Your life (if it is anything like mine, and probably even if it isn’t) sits waiting for you in just the shape you left it. There is work to be done, relationships to tend or mend or break, laundry to fold, coffee to be made, groceries to be bought. The mundanity of it can be oppressive, the obligations stifling.
I’ve never been very good at coming home.
When I was a child my family used to take a week or two each summer in San Diego.* Once, I remember, when I lay in my bed in Albuquerque upon the evening of our return I couldn’t stop crying, raging really, with a ferocity that shocked my parents. My state was induced by an intense, unmitigable longing to build another sand castle combined with the terrible fact that I could not do so, or at least not on the beach surrounded by my cousins with the Pacific waters creeping toward me.
That horrible longing is not what I feel now. But I do think the little kid I was knew something about the ephemerality of travel. She knew that when you are present in a place, particularly when you are happy, you let slip away the ongoing trajectory of the life you otherwise lead. This is why people do terrible and amazing things when they wander elsewhere. It is the explanation for the genre that is travel literature. You learn something about yourself, true, but you also let so much of yourself go.
It is difficult to return to a place when you are changed and the place is not. When you have let go of little pieces of the thing you thought yourself to be only to find that the you that is left still has to do the stupid laundry. And every time we return, we do so as new animals. We do so as creatures lighter than we were (though it might feel like a heaviness) when we left.
But what’s more, we know the place we left in order to return will begin to be lost. The minutia of living sticks around, the wild clarity of foreignness dissipates. Or it does for me, anyway.
It would be better, but more difficult, to recognize that the shifts in what and who we are, are constant. To believe that while travel may bring the flux of us into relief, just leaving the house to engage the world also makes us new and new again. It would be better to let memory do its editorial work and know that traces are left none-the-less.
Of course, I do believe this. I just can never seem to remember it when I’m doing the laundry, or buying groceries, or making my morning cup of coffee, the image of my toes seen through clear sea waters still fresh but fading in my mind.
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*Yes. We were the sort of bourgeoisie family that did such things. It was what was done, as they say. Don’t complain about the incompatibility of my Marxism with my bourgeoisie upbringing or I’ll get real mad and point you to an earlier post.
Of the early Roman morning
Posted: July 7, 2012 Filed under: Food, Mishaps, Wandering in the city Leave a comment
Sometimes, as a traveler, this sort of thing just happens. You turn a corner and are staring at some astounding monument and it is more than it should be. It is so much, in fact, that you can’t shake the uncanny feeling that you have mistaken the guidebook description for the real thing–that something has gone terribly wrong and you have landed somehow in a postcard of the place you are trying to understand, trying to navigate, instead of being in that place, at a particular moment in time.
It was late, my first night in Rome, and after the best spaghetti vongole I have ever eaten and a bottle of white table wine I went wandering with my friend, who knows Rome and speaks Italian. He led me, in a round about way, to the piazza in front of the Pantheon.
When we rounded the corner off a narrow, cobble-stone side street and I saw it and the inexplicably vacant plaza in front of it, the nearly full moon above it, I thought I might not be able to breathe.
A place like that should be anticlimactic. It should be vacated of all its power and history by the heat of high season and throngs of tourists. Or this is, at least, what I believed it should be, what I was sure it would be. But it wasn’t.
The enormous Roman thing stood there, in the well-moonlit, warm night and was so close to the gift my 18-year-old self imagined European travel to give that I stumbled. I did not believe it. I could not fathom that the stuff of novels I’d been reading since I was an over-emotional, self-obsessed and deeply romantic teenager could possibly reveal itself as real to an increasingly jaded, well-traveled and critical 31-year-old me.
“Oh, Rome!” (I hear myself saying) “I’ll never forget it!” And I cringe. But there are moments, as it turns out, when cynicism just fails–when you can weep at beauty long after you’ve stopped believing in it outside of its social construction, long after you’ve given up the idea that it might save us savage creatures from surely but slowly and violently destroying ourselves. The Roman Empire was no paradise, nor is the odd, frenetic, present-day city that stands in our global memory as its remaining vestigial limb. But for a moment, though it was brief, I understood why someone might believe a place to be holy. Why we (the communal, universal, human ‘we’) would long to stand in the shadows of our history and believe in greatness.
Now that the moment has passed I worry. I worry because what I think of is the Satyricon. I think of what ’empire’ meant once and what I believe it to mean now. I worry because I know too much and too little of history. And because while my 18-year-old self believed in History (Marxist teleology was my particular bent), my current self does not.
In the end I have decided just to be glad that the vestigial limb of my own emotional, historical and nostalgic former self is capable of flailing in the Roman night, wowed. It wasn’t like a postcard. It was me and my friend, in the very early morning, under a moon so big it seemed impossible. We were astounded, amazed, and happy that something in us was connected to something with such weight–this marble structure that bears history.
The academic in me is ashamed. The traveller, though, whom I think I may have more trust in, nods and is satisfied. Such contradictions are the very reason to wander.
Of the Italian commitment to exceptional coffee
Posted: July 5, 2012 Filed under: Food, Wandering in the city Leave a comment
I have just spent a little over a week roaming Italy in a little rented Renault with two friends (let’s just call them ‘Marc’ and ‘Mary’ to protect their anonymity).* We can now boast a large number of visits to the beaches on both the Mediterranean and Adriatic coasts. We can also boast hours and hours of zooming around winding cliff-side roads (first in Puglia and then Salerno). We sipped Brunello in Tuscany and tasted olive oil everywhere. We sang in a sea cave. We sat on verandas overlooking red rooftops and swinging bougainvillea.
In between all of this, of course, was the sizable chunk of time we spent on the autostrada. Sloping, curved roads and small Italian towns are endlessly charming. The autostrada is not. It’s just your average fast-paced automobile fare. There is one key difference, though, between the long-distance car travel I’ve done in the U.S. and what I’ve now done here in Italy. It’s all about espresso.
Every twenty kilometers or so along the highway you can pull off to a gas station or an ‘autogrill’ and when you do, inside, no matter how small the place is or how dingy, there will be a counter at which to order perfectly pulled espresso shots, cappuccini, macchiati… Its roadside coffee porn. Let it be known, too, that the rich, deep brown-nearly-black stuff is always served in a porcelain demitasse resting on a saucer with an appropriately sized stirring spoon sitting alongside the cup. It feels a little bit like stumbling into a 7/11 to pick up a few blinis smothered with caviar and créme fraiche. I’ve never had such amazing espresso in my life and I certainly never imagined one could go just about anywhere in Italy, including a truckstop, to get it.
Let it be known, too, that the commitment to exceptional coffee is, apparently, universal throughout the country. I stayed for a night with a fabulous Italian family in Cecina and the lady of the house (who, yes, made me homemade carbonara and ragu and stuffed zucchini and fileto di carne and oh god so much food I could barely move when the final course of fresh fruit arrived) had no fewer than ten stove-top espresso makers. All different sizes, colors, shapes.
Italy is a wonderland of thick, inky espresso. Would that we in the less culinarily adept countries would learn what they take here as a matter of course.
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*This is little protection. Their names are actually Marc and Mary.
Of long day's nights in Helsinki
Posted: June 27, 2012 Filed under: Wandering in the city Leave a comment
I have made my way through the Roman airport, dearest readers, and onto Southern Italy* after spending just under 24 hours in Helsinki.
In my jet-lagged daze I wandered around this lovely Finnish city. It was the mid-summer holiday weekend so the whole urban landscape was nearly vacated by residents. A slow, strange quiet hung over the neighborhoods through which we strolled. Only a few tourists and fewer locals roamed the main drags spiraling around the train station and along the water.
A combination of the weather (the wet clouds hung low and appeared nearly static–though they occasionally let loose a short burst of light rain), my lack of sleep and the very fact of being–for no real reason at al–in Helsinki when no one else seemed to be meant that everything I saw there had a bizarre patina–a kind of foggy halo.
Never have I so felt travel to be dream-like.
We sat in a cafe sipping hot cappuccino and peered out the huge picture windows at a chilly Market Square. We ferried out to an island off the coast and explored the Suomenlinna Sea Fortress. I ate smoked salmon soup at a little cafe tucked near what looked to be a ship-building warehouse. We zigzagged around the cobble-stone streets near the cathedral, glimpsed the Russian Orthodox church, drank beers in an empty bar whose mid-century modern furniture and wood-paneled walls seemed incongruous with the Finnish hard-rock they were playing. When exhaustion finally won out, I made my way back to the hotel and collapsed into the heaviest sleep.
All of the strangeness of this journey was compounded by the fact that Helsinki, at this time of year, exists in nearly perpetual daylight. When I went to bed at 11 and when I awoke the following morning at 4:30 the same early-dusk light held the grey skies.
The other end of this particular summer foray into Europe will culminate, if all goes as planned, in 14 more hours in Helsinki. But I hesitate to return–I worry that it will be something like me as Orpheus, turning back to glimpse just once at what I fear is an imagined Eurydice.
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*Worry not. More on these adventures to come.
Play of the Day
Posted: June 19, 2012 Filed under: Plays of the days, Wandering in the city Leave a comment
One of my two esteemed slumlords, Josh, played guitar backup tonight at The Other Side for a lovely rendition of David Lynch’s “You and I.“*
The Other Side is a gay piano bar that is, alas, approaching its final days in Silver Lake. Unsubstantiated word on the street is that this amazing, hidden outpost of kitsch and glory will be converted into a sportsbar sometime in the next few months.
Sigh… Would that I had found it sooner. What terrible fools would turn a gay piano bar into anything other than what it so fabulously is? And where will I go when I want to hear good Beyonce covers by perfectly coiffed twinks, or just plain good looking gay men with beautiful voices, sitting and singing their hearts out behind an electronic keyboard masked as a grand piano?
Oh, sweet Other Side. I knew you for but one night and will love you forever!
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*Let it be known that, as all this went on, the Disney Channel also happened to be the station of choice on one of the television sets above the bar, and that on said channel was broadcast a young adult film written by a friend of mine. Oh Los Angeles, you are truly an enigmatic and wonderful mistress!
Of Amsterdam, the second time around
Posted: June 8, 2012 Filed under: Food, Wandering in the city Leave a comment
Oh, Amsterdam. So lovely a little city.
The canals lined on all sides with rows of bicycles haven’t (despite their endless reproduction in all tourist materials on the lowlands) lost their charm. Dutch still-lifes and the Vermeer of the woman pouring milk in the Riljksmuseum still stun–regardless of the mass of postcards of these works they make. Dutch design and architecture, Dutch aged Gouda, Dutch people (though perhaps not Dutch cuisine) make strolling through the city at as slow a pace as you’d like a true pleasure for any visitor.
What is more, it seems a truly livable city. Particularly if you avoid certain stretches of the center and all of the Red Light District (though it is well worth suffering a trip through if you’re somewhere in the Western canal rings and need to get to fondue at Café Bern).* Infrastructure devoted to bikes and trolleys, the enormous and lovely Vondelpark and the fact that when the weather is nice, the Dutch seem to congregate in any available outdoor space, make it a place you want to stay for a stretch. Maybe a very long one.
I remember roaming in Amsterdam when I was 18. Then, because all travel was novel and certainly anything ‘abroad’ was exotic, it was strange. Now, it feels a little bit like visiting a prettier Brooklyn. The people there in the central districts are kind and good-looking, well dressed, and unflinchingly fluent in English. You can duck down an alley and find fantastic art, perfectly prepared Indonesian food, magical canal-side cafes serving La Chouffe and you’ll barely notice that you can’t utter a word in the native language. Of course you can end up in a mass of tourists oohing and ahhing at the ‘native’ bridges and photographing themselves alongside a mass of bicycles, or perhaps a live sex show. But I am willing to entertain the possibility that this darker under belly buoys up the rest of the urban culture there.
I prefer my most recent trek through the city to the one I took, low, some nearly 15 years ago. But that may just be because I like me, and cities and me in cities more now. Either way, if you find yourself meandering around Europe for any reason, Amsterdam is worth time. Maybe lots of it.
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*And you do need to get to fondue at Café Bern if you’re anywhere in Amsterdam. Trust me.
On quiet Berlin and the gifts and prohibitions of public space
Posted: May 28, 2012 Filed under: Language and text, Wandering in the city Leave a comment
I loved Berlin. I loved the S-bahn and U-bahn systems (as poorly mapped as they are by the city). I loved German beer and German wine, German food markets. I loved the Berlin hipsters and German typographical design. I could live, I think, forever in Berlin.
I am not sure if the city itself and its particular histories offers this experience to all who travel there, or if it was my own thinking, but it seemed a city devoted to the prohibitions and affordances of urban (and otherwise) space. There is, of course, ‘the wall’ and all it did and did not do, all its remaining traces in the city. These are visible. Where it once stood is marked on and off again throughout the city in various forms. Sometimes a piece of it still stands. Sometimes its former position is noted as would be the division between traffic lanes–a line below you that you cross with or without noticing.
There is also a relationship Berlin seems to have with space, with architecture and with urban planning, that is unusual in the travel I have done elsewhere. Such diverse building styles, so much space devoted to the public, so many ways to navigate…
The first full day I spent in the city I went to the Hamburger Bahnhof where, in addition to an incredible exhibit of the relationship between fine art and architecture (Architektonika 2) there was a large room devoted to Anthony McCall’s work, Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture. I have no interest in describing the pieces (because I could not do them justice) except to stay that you feel what they are doing to you and to the space around you in a way unlike any other sculptural works I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing.
Later in the week I also spent some time wandering in the Tiergarten–a park which beats Central Park in New York City and Griffith Park in Los Angeles by epic strides.
I visited the Bauhaus Archive, a Gropius-designed building, constructed posthumously and in a space he did not intend but which none-the-less houses one of the nicest special collections I’ve come across. Klee, Maholy-Nagy, Mies Van der Rohe, Breuer–all are present in the archive as artists in process more than they are as authors, monoliths.
Finally, the biergarten. Germans, despite what must be very cold winters, know how to drink outdoors. And they know how to do it with delicious sausages. I could spend every summer afternoon in a biergarten if the company was right. We went to this one: Schleusen Krug. Next to the Zoo. We saw some idle donkeys on the way in.
All of these travels through the city, and many more I took in the five days I spent in there, were made more potent by the fact that Berlin seemed always to be functioning in a hush. Even in crowds and on main drags it felt quiet, warm.
Let me close by saying (it really has to be said): Ich bin ein Berliner!*
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*I’ve been told that this most globally known of quotations is inaccurate. JFK apparently accidentally said “I am a doughnut.” But that would work, for the purposes of this blog, too. Berliners love their doughnuts. They are, in my experience, delicious.
Play of the Day
Posted: May 26, 2012 Filed under: Plays of the days, Wandering in the city Leave a commentIn Berlin tonight, on our way to dinner, we made a left onto Leibnizstrausse, passed Walter Benjaminstrausse and made a right onto Kantstrausse.
Even better (though I did not wander here): Karl-Marx-Strausse intersects somewhere in this city with Hegelstrausse.
I recognize this spatial joke is selling itself to a very tiny niche market. It just happens I’m in that particular niche. Hopefully one among you, oh readers of mine, is too.*
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*Mexico City has its own version of literary and philosophical street-naming phenomena. I’ve mentioned it before. I probably will do so again.
Of Rotterdam and the erasure of spatial histories
Posted: May 26, 2012 Filed under: Technology, Wandering in the city Leave a comment
I have given up chronology. On this blog, for the time being, and perhaps also in life. It is so unlike experience and it rarely coincides well with narrative. So, while I’ll post a note dedicated to each of the three European cities I’ve visited in the last two weeks, the order and content of these missives* will not run parallel to my own geographical trajectory.
The first of these notes (you’re reading it now) is about Rotterdam, a city intimately acquainted with the refusal of chronological history. Bombed twice in World War II, once by the Germans (a port city, it was an appropriate target) and once by the U.S. (by mistake, at least according to my Dutch sources) the post-war city served as a kind of tabula rasa for modern architecture. Rotterdam is all shiny surfaces, covered in a patina of dust knocked up by continuing construction. There is only one section of the city which resembles a pre-war Rotterdam and, as far as I could tell, it devotes itself to nostalgic tourists. The bulk of the city is new and committed, it seems, to the endless positioning of itself in the present. The “architectural capital of the Netherlands,” and home to the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi), Rotterdam is in a constant state of (re)production.
It also manages to be charming. Really. I should know. I got lost in the city at least once a day for the four days I spent there. Alleys to jog down, small green spaces and canals to hop across abound. I was particularly fond of the Museumpark which houses both greenery and striking contemporary architecture. Planned and delivered by Rem Koolhaas’s OMA, it is Rotterdam high brow, perhaps par excellence.
All this city space was made more thoroughly enthralling by the fact that my days were spent attending workshops and talks for the Prototyping Futures/Occupying the Present symposium hosted at the Piet Zwart Institute. Talks by 2012 Architecten; Men in Grey, Danja Vasiliev and Julian Oliver; the truly wonderful Active Archives folks; and many astounding others made space in Rotterdam, in cities everywhere (and in our imagined futures) come very much alive. I was particularly fond of the workshop I attended with the Failed Architecture group. You will, eventually, be able to see my notes on the matter in the archive (also active) of the conference.
I wondered often as I wandered through the city if novelty wares on the people of Rotterdam. To have a history built, erased, rebuilt, erased, remodeled and built again (even if at the slow pace of material construction) would mean a different sort of narrative of urban life than the one that exists in a Paris or a Buenos Aires. I also wondered if such reformulation, such spatial re-telling isn’t so much more in line with the way we engage history and spatial narrative in the contemporary moment. Wouldn’t Los Angeles or Rotterdam (and the two have much, I’d say, in common) be more suited in their development, in the way they’ve turned their backs on certain of their traces, to life in the contemporary moment? Is not novelty and the quick rise and demolition of structure just the stuff to which we’ve** become accustomed?
These are urgent questions, but ones I won’t attempt to answer here. Let it just be known that Rotterdam is an urban landscape well worth exploring. And one that might, despite itself, tell us much about city histories. Certainly, if it gets its way, it is already telling us mountains about city futures.
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*Can, indeed, you call something that exists somewhere on a server a missive? What is ‘sent’ on the internet?
**’We’ is always dangerous. I know. For the purposes of this particular entry, I’ll go out on a limb and say I’m speaking from a very particular, U.S. and Western European stance. Call it ‘Global North’. Call it ‘developed.’ Call it what you will.
Itinerant Me 