Fighting Your Way Out of Paper Bag in Rome

Bacon, Freud and the School of London (Rome, 2019)

Rome is an excellent town in which to fight your way out of a paper bag. No matter that Rome, NY was not a town Sal Paradise passed through with his friends Carlo Marx and Dean Moriarity in On the Road. The Colosseum is a condemned Aqueduct Track (lest one not forget the true Parco degli acquedotti over which the Christ figure hung from a helicopter in La Dolce Vita). Remember the Etruscans came before the Romans and after Caesar and Augustus came Constantine and the Visigoths. Anyone returning to Rome is carrying a lot of baggage both physically and metaphysically. Back in 2019, there was an exhibit of work by Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon and a number of other British toughs at the Chiostro de Bramante near the Pantheon. It was a perfect stop for that pugnacious road show.

read "Died Young" by Francis Levy, The Brooklyn Rail

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle

and listen to "Twenty-Five Miles From Home" by Edwin Starr