Infernal Idiots

Florence has been plagued and much of it ruined. Not by the wars fought here or revolutions. No, it has been defaced everywhere by pen wielding morons who take it upon themselves to scrawl their names everywhere there is space. Buildings which have survived centuries of human stupidity are being eroded by graffitiing gargoyles.

Today I spiraled up into the Duomo itself. High up I climbed, the narrow halls labelled from start to finish with the names of cretins who decided that they needed to add their names as witless witness to the banality and idiocy of their pitiful and meaningless existence. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Italian, Russian, Spanish and English. The only ethnicity is the International Brotherhood of the Moron. IBM, it could be, I guess, but I don’t want to be sued.

As I circled around the top layer, just below the magnificent tableau of hell, I could see names scratched and scrawled into the painting. Thick plexiglass sheets have been put up to halt those that would to try to mark it up further. And I have to wonder what could someone be thinking? What motivates someone to deface it? Something that took decades to create by talented people is picked away at by people who have no talent, no ability, no desire, no fucking life.

All I can wish is that somewhere in the new inferno, there are devils shoving flaming pikes up the asses of all those who have scribbled or scratched their little chicken names on anything they did not create.

There is no aesthetic to what they do, not even an anti-aesthetic. There is nothingness. A void.

Florentine Phones at Night

I like public things. The quotidian items of modern life. Taken for granted, they have utilitarian beauty that is largely ignored.

Phones are a major thing, for they are different in every country, and always have some kind of design elements that help you identify where it is you are or looking at. After the movie last night I wanted to wander the streets. The first thing I saw after taking the picture of the glorious cinema were these phones.

Cinema Paradiso in Florence

It is right that in this city of monuments there is one to film. I went to the most beautiful cinema last night. I had seen it noted on my map in the city guide I have and eventually found it. I was expecting, of course, a new multiplex but what I found was a long-lost treasure: a single-screen movie palace, The Odeon. Martin Scorcese’s new doc, Shine a Light, on the Rolling Stones was playing for two nights. It was a film I had wanted to see, but I would have seen anything once I walked in to buy my ticket.

Staircases wound up on my left and right, with a nicely stocked concession to the left, with alcohol and an espresso machine replacing the popcorn. Above the box office a sign showed where the movie was in its schedule:first part, intermission, and second part, plus a bunch of things I couldn’t understand. The matinee was running as I bought a ticket for the 8:10, and I could here the show, but the sound was fantastic: not too punchy on the bass, which is a problem for new theatres. I was excited.

It got better after I arrived for the show and went up to the first balcony – yes, there are two balconies. The Princess Theatre was beautiful. Statues, beautiful light fixtures, the great chandelier in the lobby which we cleaned every Christmas by hand. But it was a long narrow house. The Castro in San Francisco, where I saw all five hours of von Trier’s Kingdom Part II on my honeymoon – it’s okay, she worked at the Princess and was/is a cinephile – was immense, also with a grand chandelier, and a pipe organ. But they pale compared to the Cinema Teatro Odeon in Florence.

I almost dropped to my knees and prayed to Godard when I saw this place.

It’s not bigger than the Castro, but it’s done like an old opera house. It is a theatre that you see in photos of original movie palaces or in Singing in the Rain. It has sitting booths on the third balcony. It has carved figures lining the balcony’s border. It has another plaster at the back below the projection booth (running dual cinemacchinicas on an automated changeoever, if the control display in the lobby is accurate. Kudos to the projectionist who made up the film – not a splice mark). The seats are wood and comfortable, down up in incredibly tasteful gold fabric. But it has this ceiling. A faux stained glass dome that fades down with the lights.

From what I can gather though, it’s a modern theatre – certainly the projection and sound is. There is nothing like a big house for getting good sound. The new places, with their stadium seating to pack the most people in, wallop you with their sound – 15 000 watts I think was the figure for some of the new theatres the chain I worked for was building. A subwoofer that kicks you in the chest. Loud, but the sound is just a wall. In a big house it bathes you and lets you hear everything without beating you about the ears. I could hear individual claps in the mix last night and I thought they were coming from the audience in the theatre, not the one in the movie. The Paramount in Edmonton, which I also managed for a while, was like that, too, when it was in its heyday, when I saw Aliens. I nearly screamed when the THX logo came up the first time, those long years ago. Magic. Sound is always important in a movie – silence is it’s absence which you notice – and what better way to test it than by a modern concert film with unbelieviable sound.

Scorcese is perfect to do the Rolling Stones film. He likes their music. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of it and blues, which probably made the backstage discussion with the Stones a hell of a lot of fun (read his book on the Blues and realize that the Stones are one of the main reasons that we listen to the Blues now). He made a great concert film with The Band called The Last Waltz, which is fantastic. And he is an awesome filmmaker.

It is a film that rivals, Stop Making Sense, the Talking Heads concert film that rocked many a night at the Princess Theatre. Scorcese takes an opposite tack from Demme, using a boatload of uber-tech, including the anathema to all good concert stuff, the moving jib, whose nauseous sweep has doomed all concert footage because it’s deployed by hacks who think that it’s cool. You can see all the mechanics during the show, and it’s one of the amazing things about it: you always know you are watching a concert. And it’s a great document of the Stones, who have been the subjects of two great documentaries in the past: the Maysle’s landmark Gimme Shelter, about the tour that ended with Altamont park; and Robert Frank’s Cocksucker Blues, which I wrote about before (for those who don’t want to look it up, it’s a little scene film the Stones commissioned and own, but don’t let out and you must usually see it on a bootleg, which I did, on a bad copy from a bad copy, which is ideal for such a creation as this). But this is different.

Both the Maysles and the Frank films lack something: joy. What you get in those films is work. And, in Frank’s film, the boredom of being the Rolling Stones (the becoming of which you can see has happened in the interim between the two films). Here, in modern film stock, not grainy 16mm, – 16mm dragged over glass, through nails, and finally coated in grease – you see that joy. In several shots you see Keith close his eyes and ecstasy comes over that most wizened face and it’s beautiful. You can then see why he turned to drugs: they fill the void between those pure moments. It’s must be why blues greats turned to drink and drugs, too (or God). Our reality is harsh in the pale light off of the stage.

They are all old men. Fathers and grandfathers. They have seen much and they show it, except for the always stoic Charlie Watts who keeps it all anchored. All the skin sags, and Mick is now old man thin. Keith has his gargoyle smile. Ron has these forearms held together by veins. Charlie seems the same. But they rock. Mick bounces around and vamps for the whole show, but for a break where Keef gets to croon a few (how I wish he had sung Happy, which is one of my favourites, and which I would have cried from joy at hearing). They do shine for the whole show. Plus you get Jack White and the awesome Buddy Guy, whose voice and it’s big howling bass dwarfs Mick’s, and whose guitar playing rips through Keith’s and Ron’s in feeling and energy (well, he did influence Hendrix for a reason). Christina Aguilera is passable and she does have a great voice but she does that yelping Mariah Cary stuff a little much.

I have resisted going to a Stones concert. Partly because they are huge affairs (unless you are one of the lucky ones who gets to see them in tiny halls) and I don’t like arena rock. The Beacon Theatre helps, I am sure, restrict the Stones, and the rock staging is kept to a minimum. It’s Scorcese, his DP Robert Richardson, and the editor (as well as the great camera guys), who keep it tight and flowing. It never wavers and it never gets too big for too long. You are always up close with the band. You see fingers pressing strings into weathered fretboards. You see everybody interact like a band which has played together this long can do – unconsciously. I never found myself saying, “Geez, I wish they would cut to,,,” It made me sad I haven’t seen them live, but I doubt I would have seen the elation I got to see in the movie.

Colour TV

The BBC is on and some official in Austria is speaking of the case of captivity. The interpreter is speaking calmly and evenly as the official describes the prison. It is a flat depiction of the terrible. It becomes horrific as the official goes on to talk about the improvements that the captor had made over the decades: he had enlarged the rooms; he had made more rooms; he had given them colour TV. It is the last one which stuns me.

It is one that is common when people speak of prisons, and one of the lines in Fincher’s Se7en: “Hell, even my wife doesn’t have cable TV.” Colour TV is the measurement of civilisation, of the basic level of luxury, where life goes past mere subsistence.

It is a Herzog moment.

Florentine Light

There is something in Florence that explains the renaissance. It is the light. In Florence it amazes.

It pours down from a clear sky in a sheet where it is broken by the streets than angle off as if in Caligari’s cabinet. The light isn’t scattered about as it is modern cities whose glass canyons bounce light around; it is absorbed by the stone after it is snapped off by the low buildings, blazing on the streets polished after centuries. Not quite chiaroscuro, but film giurno.

The whiteness lasts till late aftenoon, early evening, merely moving from one side to another of each alley. Each tower, each cornice of each building is a gnomon.

Commedia dell’arte

It was what one would expect in Italy: a beautiful day is interrupted by traffic and shouting. I arrive to find a construction worker and a driver yelling and waving at each other, the worker getting a great deal of humourous satisfaction from it. Both get far too involved to notice or care that there is a line of cars building up in the parking lot which the driver was trying to exit onto the street the construction worker was repaving.”

I was using my Canon 24-105 and started zoomed in but remembering Capa’s motto – “If your pictures aren’t good, you aren’t close enough” – I moved in to shoot at about 35mm. It was a good decision even if the worker in the picture below bellowed at me and called me stupid for stepping onto the hot tarmac.

I like this photo for the odd effect of the hand, which doesn’t look like it belongs to anybody because of the scale. The worker’s arm was bending towards the camera, I guess, but it’s hidden behind the foreman’s head, giving it a weird effect.

Paris fournit inspiration

From where comes inspiration? This supposes that I have some. The past week in Paris was inspiring for my photography. I saw too much art and I need to come back for two weeks to resee some museums and make it to the Picasso and Rodin. I managed though to see a lot of photography – more than I have ever had the privelege of seeing before – from classic to contemporary art photography. It may not simply be the medium, since I have similar moments from literature, film, and music, but the density of the exposure has affected the level of the effect.

Years ago when I was working on my friend X’s film, Bibliogeography, a film inspired by a crazy group of Parisien artists, and in one scene, shot in blinding summer sun, a group of revolutionary bookophiles trundle my bright red wheelbarrow down a hill and into a railway tunnel. I was shooting it with my trusty Sony Hi-8 and overexposed it by about four stops. Whites and light colours dissolved, but the red lightened and vibrated to the foreground, light flaring off of spots, the grass dancing like neon. Then we shot from within the tunnel as the group walked from the entrance to the camera some hundred metres in. Exposing for the tunnel, the figures were dots that gathered together into a liquid shape that shimmered into the sun. It was very different than overexposed film. I loved the effect.

Years later, with my first digital camera, I experimented with it and got a few photos which still remain my favourites, even though, sadly, the originals were lost in a disk glitch. I just bought a new lens for my trip. I splurged to a Canon 24 – 105mm f4 IS L series, the most expensive photo thing I have ever purchased. But I am glad I did. It allows me to hand hold severe overexposure and it’s crystal clear when I want. Better yet, out of focus, something is not quite there.

In addition to taking straight photos of what I see, I have been looking for ways to portray the other things I see – the blinding light, the relationship of things to each other, how we react to space and space reacts to us. I have worked on some collages and have shot some others and am just getting an idea of how they work and how I can get what I want. But I have looked at doing sequences of shots before, and combined that with the overexposures.

I am now here in Florence, the city which overloaded poor Stendhal and sent him dancing into insanity. I should be so lucky.

Cartier Collage

Behind the great Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art there is an oval sitting area dug into a small rise. This is what it looks like.

This comprises about 50 images. I began shooting down (those are my feet in the very centre images) and turning roughly 45 degrees. I did this for four rotations then shortened the turns to 22.5 degrees, getting 16 images per circle. I have only one layer of those here, but have two left to use if I choose. I will have to redo the image since the full size is 7600 pixels square, and with over 50 layers the computer bogs down a bit. I may cut out the bottom and some of the sides, concentrating on the stairs in another version.

La Pigalactica

Battlestar Galactica has a lot going for it, but one of the great things is that it has, by far, the sexiest female cast since Gilligan’s Island (I’m sure Mrs. Howell appealed to some). All are strong, smart, and driven. The tone was set by the very first short of the series, with Starbuck running through the halls, all come hither sweaty. And whoever designed the Cylons followed the same rules as the skin jobs in Bladerunner – make ‘em gorgeous because if you had the choice, wouldn’t you? ( a whole ship full of naked Sharons? Uhhh…can I defect?) Even the President – no pantsuits for her, thank god – is sexy.

The whole connection between Battlestar and Paris is that we are staying in an apartment in the Montmartre area near Le Moulin Rouge and Le Pigalle. The road is lined with porn shops, and strip and sex clubs (room 1 for couples, room 2 for  homos,  room  3 for the sado-maso’s, promised one sign). The day I walked to Sacre Couer I passed by a very appropriately named shop, and I thought how nice it would be if the Battlestar women could have a little costume change for an episode or two and this shop could provide the clothes.

Paris Marche

Shoes in the Orsay 3

Perhaps it’s vacation amour fou, but central Paris is a city for walking, and I have walked a great distance in the past week: my feet hurt; I have worn a curve into my heels; and I have gladly paid the price for a shot of rich coffee just to have the chance to rest my arches. There is good reason that the flaneur is a Parisien invention: it’s easy to idle about (perhaps you may walk your turtle, but that may be to much of an objective for a true flaneur). I understand why the Situationists recommended the meandering stroll, but I also now appreciate just how grounded that idea was in their city, in Paris. They certainly would not have conceived the idea in Edmonton, Alberta, or any other place where the distances between burbs grow into stellar measurements, where, like space, between a constellation there is a whole lot of nothing.

Paris is the greatest city for walking that I have been in, and I make it a habit to walk a lot in a new place, since it’s the best way to become familiar with it. It’s a bit disorienting for me. The streets are straight, unlike Taipei, but they often run at diagonals, and other odd points of the compass, that throw me off just a touch. Nor is there a particularly visible building like, say, Citic Tower in GZ, or 101 in Taipei, that anchors you to the geography. The roads are tight and lined with five or six story buildings that I can imagine myself living in. And the roads have such lovely names that make me tingle:

It’s not just me. The streets are full of people walking about, and they aren’t all tourists or surrealist explorers; they are just Parisiens out for the day. The place you want to go may only be one or two metro stops. It’s a nice day, or at least not raining, so why not stroll to it? Except for Sunday, when I kept stationary to heal up after Saturdays semi-marathon (I think I walked a little over 20km), it has been about 10km a day,

I usually have a goal for the first bit: go to this gallery, then over here to this, but the route is rarely fixed and is always extended: “well, I could take the metro, but why don’t I just walk to Place du Concorde and then, well, it’s just a little ways up to L’Arc, so I may as well just do that, too.” It’s just so easy because, as I have written before, there is always something to see: a little parc which will inevitably have a statue of some sort or here, where Raspail and Montparnasse meet, there’s Rodin’s Balzac, cool.

The walking is eased by the magnificent metro system, whose 14 lines (plus the RER lines) stitch the central area together like a spider web, so that if you choose to rest aching feet, it’s an easy process – though one that usually involves walking from line to line following a map consultation and route planning. The stations remind me of New York’s, only cleaner, better and more clearly organized, and with nicer ads – what can you say about an add for something with a skinny shirtless guy reading Baudrillard? And it’s hard to resist riding them when the entrances entrance.

It all became a little much for my poor feet and my poor shoes since I only brought a single pair. Not only that, but here all the men seem to have great shoes, and shoes are something I like. I began to feel a little self-conscious of the slightly rounded-off toes on my well made Ecco’s, and I began to see my admittedly short feet (size 41, about an 8.5) more like hooves, or some kind of botched binding experiment. I had passed a great looking shoe store near the Bon Marche on one of my walks, another reason why moving by foot is such a great thing to do – it’s how I also found the cinema poster/picture shop on Babylone whose owner gave me the Pierrot Le Fou postcard I was going to buy.

I had decided today that after visiting the Henri-Cartier Bresson museum – which I didn’t see because I had forgotten my map which indicated the foundation, but I did see the Cartier Foundation which is somewhat confusing but at least damn rewarding – I would go to the shoe store, Bexley. I have something of a shoe fetish, so it was not difficult for me to find two pairs. Guangzhou may be a paradise for many types of clothes, and if you want to wear plastic looking shoes for about $6 it’s great, but for stylish and well-made shoes it’s the first stop in purgatory. I’m not as bad as some guys I know, particularly Tom with whom I worked at the Princess, who admitted to having 13 pairs of Fluevogs, and this was about a decade ago. I have some catching up to do.