At the risk of turning this space into a cute-animal blog, I want to share with you three things I recently found on the internet.
1. A marmot eating a biscuit.
2. A platypus playing a keytar.
3. A blog called Occasional Manatee.
I will restrain myself from similar digressions in the future. In the meantime, you’re welcome.
One of my favorite sculptures in Rome is Bernini’s “Apollo and Daphne,” and I sent postcards of it to friends from Villa Borghese. And while looking at one of the postcards upon my return, it occurred to me that the sculpture from a particular angle is strikingly similar to a shot from The Big Lebowski.
For your consideration.
Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne.
The Dude and Maude.
And I think it’s intentional.
1. Rome is a city that stirs the blood, maddens and inspires. There are a few lasting achievements of art and architecture that seemingly happen but once a century (or two) in the course of human history, and Rome hosts an alarming concentration of them (for one, Pantheon).
Among the ephemera, that a bang-on shot of espresso is available at every level of food service from slouchy snack bar to white-tablecloth restaurant is as much a factor of training and equipment as cultural reinforcement; that even for those who can only spare 80 cents the quality of their coffee is not spared. Restaurant menus indicate when a dish includes an ingredient that has been frozen, implying that the remainder of the spread is fresh.
There are perhaps more marble statues, frescoed ceilings, and gelato shops per capita in Rome than anywhere else in the world, and while there’s more to the place than art and food, they’re a fine way through which to experience the city.
2. A worthwhile thing to do in Rome that no guidebook or blog told us was taking in the sunset from Giardino degli Aranci (Garden of Oranges). It is, true to its name, an orange grove on Aventine Hill (about a kilometer uphill from Piramide station) with a stone (marble?) balcony tacked on at the end. That balcony faces west.
When in Florence, order a steak.
3. Travelling in the 21st century continues to amaze me. Though supersonic air travel has been relegated to 20th-century antiquity, the Schengen Agreement, Euro currency, and global networks of cash machines, credit cards, and mobile telephony have all but eliminated logistical hassles for Americans touring much of Europe. I am not taking this stuff for granted.
4. My undergraduate Italian held up surprisingly well, and I still consider it a minor miracle that I was able to correct my error when booking our return trip to Rome from Florence at the S.M.N. ticket office without the use of English or incurring an additional charge. While at the post office, a clerk seemingly eager to speak some English bridged the language gap to scrounge up 25 stamps for international postcards. Occasionally, a combination of ambient English guided tours and Wikipedia on my BlackBerry enhanced our experience of a place.
5. As a meta note, this trip was my first vacation in a new place in over two years. The degree to which my creative output has fallen in that time has surprised and saddens me. I think it’s mostly a byproduct of being enrolled in school and in a relationship where someone else’s time is to be considered in equal measure as my own, but part of me also thinks that it’s because I haven’t been anywhere new to me in too long.
6. There is no number 6.
7. My failure to sell or even give away my tickets to The National concert on Sunday prompted me to attend the show on limited sleep immediately upon arrival in Washington. It turned out to be a wise play, as the show was spectacular and my sleep schedule was tuned perfectly the morning after. The first time I saw them, I was standing for the whole show and aside from the band and their instruments and equipment I remember the stage was bare. This time I was seated and there were lights and horns.
If there is a band for whom the placement of a grand oak tree on stage is aesthetically consistent with their music, it would be The National.
8. The use of clean as an aesthetic judgment bothers me. Cleanliness is distinct from organization, and that mere organization often presents itself as cleanliness is a given and the judgment provides little in the way of compliment or critique. Some alternatives are minimal, which reflects a position within art history, and simple, which indicates a composition with few moving parts or even one that has been inadequately considered.
9. I’m also growing increasingly wary of interesting as an adjective, mostly because it is subjective and also because it tends to describe things that really ought not be beyond the threshold of known vocabulary. I want to know how that interesting thing actually held interest, whether it engaged, stupefied, inspired, saddened. If all you can muster is interesting, either learn some new words or experience some new things.
10. Christina and I are planning our trip to Cuernavaca for Carlos and Ana’s wedding in July, so I can safely say that two years will not pass before my next vacation in a new place. However, my high-school Spanish is dustier than my college Italian, so negotiating the language gap could get, well, frustrating, with a high chance of gesticulation.
In the meantime, we will watch The New Pornographers, Passion Pit, and Tokyo Police Club in concert. And I will be starting at NavigationArts on 21 June, which is also the date of my 5th anniversary in Washington. And given I’m sentimental and wish to commemorate that event, I hope to publish another piece of writing – perhaps a list – on that date.
11. And therein lies an exotic destination, experiences of live music, and a pair of personal milestones to commemorate – creative inputs and motivation. I think I can keep this up.
Tomorrow, I’ll be on Delta 246 bound for FCO, and on Sunday morning, I’ll set foot in Rome. For some, my last postcard from Houston promised a return to jetset correspondence, and this was what I had in mind. Scattered showers in the forecast, 21 at the sun’s peak, and a cool 14 in the evenings.
I put in my notice at CQ-Roll Call yesterday, and the two weeks will start after I return from vacation. After those two weeks, I’ll be starting as an information architect at NavigationArts – a firm whose work I’ve respected for years. So there’s that.
In news neither related to vacations on the continent nor major career leaps, I switched out a couple light bulbs in my apartment to compact fluorescents. While some of you may gasp, given my appreciation of quality light, my electric bill the last few months has been higher than I’d have liked, especially for a place like mine. I installed them in fixtures where the bulbs would not be directly exposed in an attempt to mitigate their adverse effects on color perception.
If you’ll allow the UX designer in me to support my broader argument as an interior decorator, after living with the bulbs for a day, I realized another major problem I have with CFLs: they have loading time. Incandescents, for all their faults, give off beautiful light and do it instantaneously. The CFLs’ delay may only be a couple seconds, but I’ve installed these bulbs in my bathroom. As a use case, I’ve come home from nights of eating and drinking where those seconds matter.
In any case, I’ll be eating and drinking quite a bit over the next week. Somewhere between the gelato and Michelangelos, I’ll dispatch some postcards. In the meantime, I’m wrapping up for the week at the office and getting ready to head out in the rain – thank you to pagans and pessimists alike who helped make this happen.
The new mix was called The Alligator and The Owl. The new mix was (at least) two discs long and much less melancholy than any playlist I’d assembled before. And appropriately so – 26 has so far been the best year of my life, starting with one amazing day.
The first disc is done, and you can listen to it here as a single 74 MB mp3. Work on the second disc stagnated for months, and so did my writing practice. I’ve been trying to resume the latter; the former, I’m reconsidering.
Occasionally, Christina would suggest I finish the second disc. Last time we talked about it, she suggested scrapping it and starting anew. That’s probably what’s going to happen.
At some point since the last time I dispatched postcards, the international rate increased from 90¢ to 98¢. Friends outside the United States to whom I’d written: please accept my apology if it seems you were left off my list since my last adventure more than a year past. Here’s the gist of what I wrote.
At the Museum of Printing History
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If American supermarkets are like cathedrals, then the day before an impending catastrophe is like Easter vigil mass – the place is packed and you don’t get to leave for at least two hours. After the wait for ingredients for meatloaf and pasta e fagioli, we hoped the snowpocalypse would live up to the forecast, if only to rationalize our maddening experience at Harris Teeter.
And by Sunday morning, this was the view of Washington from space:
(From NASA via DCist)
Alternately snowmageddon and snowpocalypse, the experience on the ground for the last four days has been imbued with end-of-the-worldness. I’ve narrowed the romantic appeal of the debilitating snowfall to the erasure or essentialization of the known world. Cars are camelback marshmallows, the solid black asphalt streets are an aqueous white. My weekdays have been spent cooking, eating the leftovers, watching The Wire and movies set in D.C. (a past-present-future set of All The President’s Men, Burn After Reading, and Minority Report).
Today, the snow hasn’t been falling so much as it has been blowing, alighting on the meter-deep snow drifts only after coasting on highway-speed winds. It’s the third snow day this week, and tomorrow’s the fourth. The city is on spring break, but it’s February with treacherous weather and very little notice. The fucking meatloaf lasted four days and was fucking amazing, worthy of every expletive. I’m also developing a taste for roasted fucking vegetables – especially carrots and onions. There’s still some soup for lunch tomorrow.
Tomorrow night, we’re scheduled to fly to Houston, but that’s tentative like so much else in this state. But when I fly out, it’ll be the first postcard of the year, and Chinese New Year at that. And there will be no snow.
Christina and I spent part of Saturday moving a bookcase from Alexandria to Arlington in a snowstorm. It was not our plan to move a 6′-×-6′-and-heavy piece of furniture in such weather, but due to some misinterpreted communication with the bookcase’s previous owner, we found ourselves with a truck reservation and a free afternoon. While we spent that afternoon actually moving a bookcase, I’ve been responding to the question of what I did during the snowstorm as learning to move a bookcase in a snowstorm.
The sight of cars spinning their wheels on moderate but icy hills was not uncommon – both Christina’s car and the rented truck were subject to acceleration without movement. Once moving, the pedal that would usually stop a moving car sometimes did not – in these moments, I reached for the parking brake. On the 395, passing maneuvers were rare, the use of hazard lights was frequent, and the flow of traffic on a four-lane freeway stayed consistently below 35 mph with all possible civility.
That civility was hardly limited to paved surfaces. While moving the bookcase into the truck, a neighbor of the seller offered a shovel to clear the bed of snow. The seller himself hoisted the piece into place for the road. We considered taping cut-up garbage bags over it and then decided not to – the air was sufficiently cold that the snow would not turn to water (and the bookcase wouldn’t soak it up) while we were driving.
And so, we made our way to Arlington and (with the better traction attendant to carrying a heavy piece of furniture on the back of a rear-wheel-drive truck) up the hill on Daniel Street to the front of Christina’s building. As we haltingly shoved the bookcase from truck bed to snowbank, one of her neighbors (en route to a party) offered a hand and very quickly the unwieldy piece of furniture was in her bedroom and closely matching the woodgrain of her folding bench seats. He took a beer in thanks and welcomed her to the neighborhood.
On that day when snow covered the lane markers and signposts and other artifacts of traffic law, we were treated to a climatized manifestation of the illustration of a street intersection in England from Jonathan Zittrain’s TED talk on random acts of kindness on the internet. His illustration was to support a point that in the absence of directives and laws, civility prevails (and therefore, Wikipedia maintains a reasonable standard of information quality).
Philosophy and human nature aside, civility indeed prevailed on that afternoon. And however you may disdain precipitation and bitterly cold weather, that civility may not have revealed itself – and we may not have had need of it and therefore a venue to appreciate it – otherwise. It’s part of the reason I love living in a place with a bit of a winter.
And in this weather, I learned how to use a parking brake and hazard lights as part of a driving routine, that wood furniture is better transported in snow than rain, and that strangers can be immeasurably helpful and civil and a default position of ‘scared shitless’ towards unknown persons is sometimes untenable.
And on Sunday, I learned to never never walk barefoot in the snow.
