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| August 2004 »
The shopping mall is exhibiting personal devices made for escaping East Germany: a homemade submarine (powered by paddle), a hot-air balloon made from patchwork material that carried a whole family over mountains, an ultra-light aircraft powered by a lawnmower engine, a scuba outfit, and a car and motorcycle disguised as government issue. There is also a table manned by a women that allows you to see your very own STASI files. It's all a weird compliment to Benetton and the shoe shops surrounding this stuff in the Goethe Gallerie (a mall named after the great man — is he rolling over or what?).
We're still trying to cut costs here and there on the proposed South American tour. We're getting closer to not losing lots of money, but we're not there yet. Had a big meeting with all the band and crew; it was maybe the first time we've all sat in one room.
I ran along the river here and waved or smiled at people I passed — but mostly I got no reactions or heads down. Maybe it’s bad manners on my part, or leftover Communist paranoia on theirs. Then again, maybe I am just a stranger.
As our show began, I looked out on a small sea of people mostly dressed in black, some holding umbrellas against the drizzle, and I felt disconnected. It was less than 24 hours since we were in sunny Italy by the seaside and the contrast in cultures was shocking. I hadn't absorbed or processed it yet. I made some weird comments like, "we haven't been here before and so we don't know you and you don't know us."
But about halfway through people began dancing and smiling and I loosened up as well. Maybe I let go of some of my preconceptions and maybe they did too.
Malu has a tendency to sleep as late as possible, but I'm determined she not sleep through our day off in Rome. In the morning I go for a run along the nearby Tiber and wake her for lunch and sightseeing. We hit the Vatican, the Trevi fountain, Plaza Novena, Spanish steps and zoom around the coliseum on the way back to the hotel. It's a long afternoon, but the weather is less hot than the last few days and walking around Rome is not so bad.
I ride my bike to check out a contemporary art show called "Mediterraneans" nearby in a former giant abattoir. An artist named El Perro (Spanish, I guess) has creating a shooting gallery with an air gun that points at a view of a street corner, with cars and people occasionally passing across the frame. One has to pay for ammo, and the gun cannot be turned around to the main gallery space, so it must pack a real wallop.
A (Turkish?) artist Erkan Ozgen showed 2 videos. In one, two idiots in business suits sit on donkeys and are lost in some rock-strewn, deserted countryside. They ask a passerby which road leads to Tate Modern. It's a one-shot joke at marginalized nations' attempts to break into the international art scene.
A second video is called Adult Games; it shows a group of kids swarming into the frame, where we see a playground. The kids are all in black guerilla-style masks. They are pretending to be urban terrorists like the ones they see on TV. This video is funny, like the guys on donkeys, but becomes chilling as the children engage in their mock battle.
Raeda Sapdea(sp?) made a clothesline out of braided human hair.
Mircea Cantor showed a lovely video of what looked at first like a street demonstration in Tirana, Albania...lots of people carrying mylar mirrors instead of text placards. The close-ups of the multiple reflections of the "signs" made a weird, distorted image of the city.
There were maybe 4 other people wandering around this place. Not exactly a big buzz about it in town, I guess.
The venue is a "Latin village" adjoining a racetrack on the periphery of the city. A series of fake Mexican and Spanish bars surround a stage and standing area. One bar is called El Peyote.
South America tour is still not confirmed for October, though many of the dates and good venues are confirmed as available. Getting that far has been a struggle, and the changes that were made to get those places will no doubt affect the budget, so we have to have a meeting and see where we’re at.
We're paused here for 8 hours on the way to Napoli. Last night was a close call. Driving through the rainy hills of Slovenia after the show in Maribor, a truck began to overtake the bus on a curve. It was a two-lane highway and, sure enough, here comes an oncoming 18-wheeler.
I was in my bunk and felt a horrible braking, lurching, swaying, and banging as Mick, our driver, made a desperate move to negotiate between the two trucks and the ditch. The offending truck took off our left-wing mirror and dented the door, but it could have been a real serious mess if the trucks collided. We’d have been part of that mess for sure.
Malu was in the upstairs lounge watching Austin Powers. She was fine. The sound of Mike Myers' character provided a weird sonic backdrop as we all gathered to see what had happened. Graham and Mick found the wing mirror in the ditch.
Last night's show in Maribor was sadly drenched. The city has its yearly arts festival, of which this is a part, and they'd built a nice floating stage on the river next to a medieval tower. It promised to be a lovely evening, but a huge thunderstorm pummeled the area and, though it let up, attendance was spotty. Also, the festival sponsors and VIPs were given the entire area in front of the stage (the plebeians were in the bleachers). These VIPs were, of course, bored and completely unresponsive. I wiggled my butt, spazzed out, danced, and jumped but nothing was going to move them.
In the restaurant where we ate was a lovely embroidered picture of Tito, the former ruler of Yugoslavia (through the Soviet era). There was also a large wall map of the country as it was at that time, with the various regions — Hrvatska (Croatia), Bosnia, etc., delineated as they are now. Except, here, they are all part of the Yugoslav nation.
The décor is ironic nostalgia.
Hard to imagine a similar politically ironic décor in Western Europe or North America. In North America, one can imagine Brady Bunch or Gilligan's Island themed restaurants. Pop culture is treated ironically all the time. But not Nixon- or Reagan-era politics. Imagine going into restaurant that was Cold War themed. It would just be creepy.
Skulls
I visited Siena once before in response to an invitation for some public art pieces. I suggested, amongst other things, historical plaques commemorating ordinary people with outstanding attributes. These never happened.
As part of the visit, I was given a tour of the former hospital Santa Maria Della Scala, which was then in the process of being renovated, its frescos and murals cleaned and revealed, its sub levels dug out. Apparently, it was the oldest public hospital in Europe; it functioned as a place of rest and healing for ailing pilgrims who came to the Cathedral across the street seeking succor.
It was a functioning hospital until the end of the 1970s. The rooms were filled with amazing frescos. What an amazing place to lay in bed recovering, gazing at these images! It must have been like recovering in the Sistine Chapel ceiling. One wonders if they ascribed a healing power to the paintings themselves. No doubt they thought there would be benefits from contemplating the images of Mom, Her Son, and his tragic story.
Anyway, we are led down to the sublevels, where tiny Japanese forklifts and earthmovers tread like dusty subterranean creatures through the hallways. In a corner is a pile of human skulls, haphazardly piled as if they were old coffee cups left by the workmen. Further on, out of the work path, is another pile — heaps of them.
It turns out that many of the pilgrims came during the plague in hopes that the Saints or even Mary herself would offer some assistance. They'd end up dying in droves on the upper floors of the hospital and then were tossed into chutes — like dirty laundry.. Their bodies landed in heaps in the basement, in tubs of lye, to decompose — or so I was told (wouldn't that dissolve the bones too?).
 Malu described the cathedral as a walk-in "Where's Waldo?" It has an ex voto section featuring an array of motorcycle helmets. (I explain that the owners probably prayed for recovery from an accident and left the helmet as evidence of the saints' assistance.)
Further on from the hospital, another place had an extensive exhibition of religious relics: arm bones, more skulls, and blood-encrusted fingers and nails, purportedly from the cross. (Years ago, this gave me the idea for a cloning Jesus movie.)
Jennifer, who studied here for a couple of months, says the horse teams for the big Palio race around the campo have evolved a long-standing, institutionalized corruption. The starting positions are picked by straws, but there are a whole series of contingent actions that the jockeys can take, based of a series of bribes. If a rider for the Owls is next to the Eagle team's horse, he has an offer from the Turtle neighborhood to cut off Eagle – so it gets quite complicated. All sorts of possible actions can come into play, based on the starting positions.
The corruption, the bribes, and their various effects seem so complex that they can't possibly be efficient. It's just too damn convoluted to work! Maybe that is the point: the game, the human interaction, the calculation, and the numerous other factors that can go wrong mean no one is really a total winner or loser. There is always someone or something else to blame.
A group of us had dinner at Osteria Castelveccio, a little place on a side street run by a few people with a small menu. Everything was incredibly tasty.
We get on the bus at 2AM and continue our drive towards Napoli.
It's late. Malu watches a movie on TV. Elizabeth Taylor is wooing a violinist who, unfortunately for her, loves his art first and foremost. Taylor's character's name is Louise, and she plainly is annoyed by his rise and the fact that she is number 2 in his heart. It's super corny and we try and guess what will happen. She takes him on a trip to St. Moritz and I suspect he'll have a skiing accident and never play again, to her secret pleasure. But I'm wrong. The plot becomes more convoluted and I turn in, thinking to myself, "yeah it's corny, but there's an element of truth there that I've personally experienced more than once."
Nothing convinces like genuine feelings. Robert Wright, in his book The Moral Animal, proposes that there are genetic spring boxes, so to speak, that come into play when real and genuine feelings are needed for a specific task. Love, for example, can be felt in a real a true form if the right situation presents itself.
He maintains that this all happens unconsciously. No one decides to fall in love, or to have other intense emotions, but there just might be circumstances that prod the hidden box to spring open and release those feelings so that a task can be accomplished more successfully.
I wonder to myself if the delusions of world leaders, tyrants, despots and even elected officials work the same way. It is a mystery to me that W. Bush, for example, can believe that either that the cause is all good or that the lie doesn't exist. He and others appear to believe what they are saying. I don't believe even Ronald Reagan was a good enough actor to knowingly give false statements in the interest of himself, his pals, and their shared ideology. Certainly Arnold is not a good enough actor.
I saw a documentary on Imelda Marcos when I was in NY; she made some bizarre, surreal, deluded and tragic statements — tragic for the dead and suffering Philippines. But she seemed to be completely convinced; she was living in a world entirely of her own making, which is maybe what the U.S. people are doing.
We seem to have a genetic capacity for self-delusion, Wright says. This capacity developed because it is useful when we need a strong emotion to harden us or to guide us through a task or relationship. And self-delusional feelings are as real as any other feelings.
I'm feeling a little better. So, although we cancelled a big dinner at a spot with music, a few of us go out in search of food. I suggest the floating restaurants I’d seen anchored on the Sava last time we were here. We pass by rows of concrete apartment buildings and reach a spot — the Soviet-era (in appearance, anyway) Hotel Jugoslavia.
There are lots of the floating restaurants and bars anchored near here on the Sava, and each has its own theme. People mill about everywhere. This must be the place for bar-hopping nightlife in Belgrade. It's very scenic as well. The moon is beginning to rise over the river and the city center is visible upstream where the river bends. The rest of this area seems to be parkland.
The women here — and those passing in and out of the hotel lobby — dress like hookers. Well, I'm exaggerating, but there are lots of heels, extreme push-up bras, and tarty trimmings. I assume that it is just the local fashion, that it's not necessarily working attire. Did some percentage of the men die in the war, leaving an excess of women? That would explain the tendency for women to bait their hooks so heavily.
Mauro, Graham, and Sara all confirm this. They say that there seem to be more women in the bars and clubs than men. Mauro says that in one bar, he looked around an was surrounded by 9 gorgeous women, and no men. At our concert, a local person claimed that the audience was 80% female.
A Greek artist, Danae Stratou, who I'd met at the Valencia Biennial (she had an amazing installation of an earth room in which the earth "breathed") said hello after our show. She is installing a new piece for a big contemporary exhibition called Transcultures; it has pieces by artists from all over. It will open next week in time for the Olympics. She invites me to come have a look, though it's still being installed.
She picks me up on her motorbike, and we chat as we zoom through the terrible Athens traffic. We stop by a record store, as I'd been given a list of recommended Greek CDs, which they have. Then we sit at a café where tout les monde are drinking iced cappuccinos.
Her new piece is an installation of films of seven rivers — Ganges, Amazon, Danube, Niger, Nile, Yangtze, and Mississippi — all taken from mid-stream so that you see the banks moving on each of the seven screens. On each screen (they are arranged in a circle around you), the riverbank moves at the same rate as the next one, so they — the rivers — flow into one another.
It's very tranquil and calming, even though the sound wasn't on when I was there. It will be a mix of the ambient sounds one would hear along these rivers, she said. The workmen are busy touching things up and adjusting the projections.
Other artists are busy with their own installations. Do-Ho Suh has a very nice piece that seems more or less finished – a translucent sewn stairway of pink scrim (silk?) fabric that ascends to a false ceiling made of the same material.
Mona Hatoum's is all in rusty bits all over a room. I can't tell what it's going to be.
Came down with a cold as we depart Athens. I'd been fighting an itchy throat for a couple of days, no doubt from being in and out of air conditioning and the hot weather, combined with the jet lag. I had a similar illness at the beginning of our last European leg and it eventually became a fever (which I've got now) but was gone in a day or so.
The stuffed sinuses have done something to one of my ears, due to the changes in cabin pressure on the flight to Belgrade. It feels weird, though I can hear fine.
I'm in bed all day, feverish, with chills and sniffles. Kleenexes litter the floor of the room...just like in Reggio Emilia...whussup?
The concert was far from sold out due to a conflict with a suddenly scheduled football match — Greece vs. Czech Rep. A few days ago, the Greeks surprised everyone by beating France in a playoff, which put them into the semifinals. This game was never supposed to have happened — but it did, so our show was moved earlier in the evening to accommodate the game. We probably would have sold out otherwise, but we did OK. Good appreciative crowd, though. It was at an outdoor stage at the base of a stone quarry. You couldn't imagine a hotter location during the day, but at night it cooled off.
The game, which went on immediately after our show, was projected on a giant screen behind the drums. We drove to the hotel during halftime and I collapsed on the bed, only to be awakened by the weird noise of the city erupting. Greece had won in overtime. The whole city was screaming. There were fireworks. People ran down the streets wearing flags as capes. It was around 11:30.
 We're all in various stages of jet lag, and it's hot as hell here in the daytime. Even the hotel has ruins in it. On the way to the breakfast area there is a kind of diorama of a excavated wall.
Malu is completely unimpressed by all the ruins. It's just old busted-up walls and buildings to her. I explain that, for centuries, there weren't neo-classical post offices, government buildings, train stations, and monuments all over the world like there are now. This ubiquitous style was a result of some obsession and rediscovery of the Parthenon, the Acropolis, and other sites that set that architectural ball rolling a few centuries ago. So these ruins are looked upon now as the Ur structures, the primeval model of what an imposing civic structure should look like. And, of course, how could she know that their crumbly nature makes them all the more romantic. That's a nutty concept for a kid's head to wrap itself around (not that anyone should necessarily buy into the romantic notion of ruins).
She's reading an Ian McEwan book for school, and I have to help her with its Britishisms. Even the weird syntax and grammar is peculiarly British. What's a QC? (I dunno) What are Y-fronts? (that one I knew) All of which makes it seem 'real' — of a place and a time, but also awfully parochial and limiting for a book that's not in the "voice" of a lad or provincial lout.
But, of course, the Brits claim it's their language and they can mangle it as they see fit.
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