Yes, the tower really does lean. Climbing up is a disorienting experience. A long winding marble staircase is enclosed in the center, with scattered openings to the outside revealing the horizon at a skewed angle. More than half of the pillars on each tier have been slowly replaced by harder marble because the original marble was showing signs of crumbling. Maybe the whole thing will be replaced, little by little, piece by piece, with harder and harder materials resembling the original, until there is nothing of the original left.
Pisa is a small university town and all of the students ride bikes. There are bikes leaning everywhere, not locked to anything - unthinkable for a New Yorker. The riders weave through the pedestrians and much of the center has almost no auto traffic.
The show is in a neighboring town 10 km away, at an arts center in the middle or nowhere. It's baffling that it's here. I suspect most of the Pisan's won't be able to attend because it's beyond comfortable biking distance. So why are we here and not at a theater in Pisa? Italian cultural politics again?
After the show I ask one of the local girls and she says that this arts center is the more adventurous one; they stage more avant guard plays and present more unusual musical acts (Meredith Monk is due here soon). The theater in Pisa is more conservative. So here we are, surrounded by freshly plowed fields and yapping farm dogs in the distance.
The audience is a disorienting mixture. I see gray-bearded professors and young women, but not together.
Images of fallen U.S. soldiers returning in coffins have appeared in the U.S. press for the first time in this war. It has been as if none of the boys ever really died. Sure, there were reports of Americans being killed, abstract numbers, but without images somehow the U.S. public didn't register the fact. Maybe it will begin to sink in now. The Pentagon is furious.
Bush's ratings have apparently gone up. He made a speech saying that bringing democracy to Iraq is our God-given duty. Of course, the Bush Gang are not really interested in democracy; they confuse it with brutal capitalism (not even with their favorite phrase - "free enterprise" - as the U.S. trade agreements have never been fair and balanced). Bringing God into the picture - a kind of Manifest Destiny - makes it a Crusade, a religious war. So we can expect more Hell than Heaven.
The Herald Tribune reports that the Japanese captives, on being returned to Japan, were subjected to more shame and humiliation than they received at the hands of their Iraqi captors. The Japanese cultural reaction was that these people went there against their government's advice, as renegade independents, and "now look at the trouble you've caused for all of us." Their stress levels confronting the Japanese negative reaction is higher than that at the moment of having knives held to their throats.
