Lost Weekend

Remember the way you’d roll the images back on a 16mm celluloid projector. It was the perfect metaphor for the feeling you have when you do something which you can’t reverse. Say you’ve had a little fender bender, you’d like to relive the day and not end up in the parking lot outside the Walmarts where the accident occurred. Or you wish that in a moment of annoyance you hadn’t assassinated your friend’s character in a way that apologies won’t erase or that you didn’t slip and fall in the shower and begin a chain of injuries to your shoulder that has resulted in a string of operations that would otherwise have been totally unnecessary. There are people who believe that there's a plan to the universe and that wherever you are is where you’re meant to be—a soothing notion since it obviates the need to consider what you would have or could have done, if you believe in the concept of free will. Still there are all these invisible lines. Addicts who are in recovery know all about this since they're filled with urges to satisfy their addictions and slip into old behaviors. In Billy Wilder's Lost Weekend (1948), Ray Milland is tormented by his desires and then finally caves into them and the movie brilliantly charts the topography of the character, a writer’s temptation-filled landscape. If you've ever been trying to avoid sweets, or porn, or any of the stimulations, that aren’t necessarily bad or good, but which may have consequences for someone who can’t stop, then you know how taunting and haunting certain lures can be. For instance the buttery smell of a freshly baked croissant or scone is going to be a difficult thing for someone who has a problem with carbs. You may be addicted to a certain person who isn’t good for you and throw caution to the wind, saying to yourself that you deserve some pleasure amidst all the pain of your otherwise barren and lonely existence. You get the moment of pleasure, but then have to live with the results which can mean doing the same thing over and over again and in some cases enduring the kind of abusive behavior that you'd promised yourself you'd relinquished forever.

Rome Journal: SPQR

 Roman street art (photo by Francis Levy)

It’s not difficult to say goodbye to Rome to the extent that Roman civilization, the idea of Rome is so pervasive. Senates and stadia all derive from Rome. Romans may have conquered Greek statuary, but when it comes to monuments they trump all comers. What would Augustus have said about the current monuments debate. Sure Rome was pillaged, with the heads of many of its sculptures being rediscovered centuries later in the ruins, but Romans may  may have set a kind of standard in terms of what it is to be remembered. It's one of the reasons so many artifacts of Imperial Rome are now at the fingertips of archeologists and all those who seek to investigate the past, an increasingly fragile sport in the culture of technocracy were erasure is so facilely accomplished and an institution, which may not exist in any particular location that anyone could ever pass by, disappears before it has had the chance to become a signpost. "Arrivederci Roma" may be the title of a famous song, but it's essentially incorrect. You never say "arrivederci" to Rome since it’s ubiquitous and a part of the skeleton of the species. What form of social media could ever compete with the SPQR engraved on every manhole cover of the city?

Rome Journal: Quartiere

Quartiere is the name for neighborhood in Italian. Most tourists who visit Rome know the city by virtue of the Trevi fountain (where a British-German woman got fined 450E after trying to duplicate Anita Ekberg’s famed scene in La Dolce Vita). Of course there are the Spanish Steps and the Colosseum, but these have little to do with the neighborhoods that people live in. For instance, if you go to Trastevere another high ticket spot (where tourists go to supposedly get a feel for real life) and then climb the Gianicolo, one of the seven hills of Rome, you can descend the other side to Monteverde where nary a tourist is to be found. On the main shopping street of Monteverde, the Via Fonteiana, there's a kosher butcher which tells you that you’ve arrived in a Jewish section of town, maybe not the old ghetto formed in 1555 around the Rione Sant'Angelo but a series of bustling streets, near the Piazza di Donna Olimpia. A neighborhood like Casal Bertone, way out on the outskirts of Rome and presided over by the Palazzo dei ferrovieri with its magnificent archway through which Anna Magnani playing Mamma Roma walks in a her striving for a better life, is a side of Rome that few tourists ever see. Pigneto is a bohemian district, famous for the wall painting of Pasolini eyes (courtesy of the artist Maupal and titled "the eye is the only one that can see the beauty" after a Pasolini poem) peering down at all newcomers. The B line; which traverses Rome from north-east to south, is bookended by Ribibbia, a working class neighborhood which is the site of Rome’s prison and Laurentina in the EUR, the location of the ill-fated l942 World's Fair where Mussolini had intended to showcase Italian futurist/fascist architecture and design and where  you will find yourself far from the madding crowd--of antiquity seekers.

Rome Journal: The Washing Machine of Tomorrow

Roman washers (photo by Francis Levy)

In your classic Italian neorealist film of the 50’s and 60’s you have your Anna Magnani type character, gutsy and outspoken, a survivor, washing her families clothes and hanging it out of the same window through which she displays her pulchritude. With such stereotypes in mind, many visitors to Rome may be surprised to discover the existence of lavanderias and lavasecccos where clothes can be washed and dry cleaned. Even more prevalent however is the Italian version of the washing machine. These items display all the ingenuity of Italian design together with its ability to perplex the user. They're  sleek objects that possess great style and unusual colors like gray, a hue that is nary to be found in the United States where almost all machines are white. Their doors with their elegant peepholes that look like expensive glasses also display the features one has come to expect in familiar Italian design objects made by Fiat or Olivetti. But that's where the honeymoon ends since once you have located your local washer dryer in the dwelling in which you're living, you're going to have to begin the laborious process of negotiating its directions which might compete with Marinietti’s Futurist Manifesto (1909) in terms of their millenarian insistence on avoiding simple explanation. Nevertheless the washing machine is where you're likely to find the Anna Magnanis of tomorrow along with anyone else who wants to get their clothes washed. No pain, no gain. No matter how difficult your machine is to work,  it will all come out in the wash.

Rome Journal: Ludwig Pollak: Archeologist and Art Dealer

Laocoon with Pollak's bent arm (photo by Francis Levy)

There are a thousand stories in the naked city, but this one is worth millions and comprises the essence of "Ludwig Pollak: Archeologo E Mercante D'Arte (Prague 1868-Auschwitz 1943)" at the Museo di Scultura Antica Giovanni Barracco and the Museo Ebraico Di Roma. As the curators describe it, Ludwig Pollak was born to a Jewish family in Prague when the city was one of the commercial and intellectual centers of the Austro-Hungarian empire. He studied at the Archelologica Epigraphische Seminar under Theodor Mommsen where his colleagues were involved in excavations at Pergamon, Ephesus and Samothrace. He trained in Vienna and eventually traveled to Rome in l893 where his mandates became archeology, collecting and art dealing. His love of Rome was such that he called himself "Ludovicus Romanus" and referred to the city as his “Alfa and Omega.” He started to meet people like Count Alexander von Nelidow, the Russian Ambassador to Constantinople whose collection of antique jewelry he analyzed. His reputation grew as he discovered a 5th century B. C. work by the Greek potter Hieron whose fragments he sold to the English collector E.P. Warren and a 3rd century B.C. work, the “Maid of Anzio,” which had been found on the site of Nero’s villa. He discovered a Roman copy of Greek sculpture by Myron also from the 5^thCentury BC, that had been seen at the Acropolis by Pausanius. Probably his most preeminent discovery, however, was that of the bent arm of the Laocoon. The statue with a missing arm had been reconstructed in 1506 with a straight appendage reaching out, but his finding completely changed archeological history. Giovanni Barracco was one of Pollak's clients. Pollak met Freud, who had always believed that archeology was a metaphor for the psyche and with whom he shared a mutual affection for Goethe’s concept of “bildung" or self development. The Pollak show underscores the tremendous schizophrenia of a culture that could produce Heinrich Schliemann and Kristallnacht. Would that Pollak's insights into antiquity could have alerted the scholar and connoisseur to his own monstrous fate.

Rome Journal: Real Estate of Antiquity

Imagine if Yankee Stadium were located in Times Square. That’s tantamount to the location that Rome’s Colosseum, the largest amphitheater in history (and one of the Seven Wonders of the world), occupies. Actually, the population inside the walls of ancient Rome, numbering approximately 500,000 was a lot smaller than a modern city and in lieu of skyscrapers filled with people, there was just the old agora—so Romans attending events were unlikely to have experienced the kind of traffic jams that are now produced when fans travel to see the Giants at the MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford. The fact that it was commissioned by Vespasian in 72AD and finished by his son Titus in 80 (and later Domitian) makes it a construction project that was also completed in record breaking time, even by modern day standards. How often have federal and state projects (like the Mario Cuomo Bridge) become mired in red tape! However, construction was probably facilitated by the comparative lack of building codes that needed to be satisfied in ancient times. The fact that an estimated 300,000 people and animals died in the skirmishes which were entertainment and that the whole project which could attract between 50-80,000 spectators rudely came to a halt in the 6^th century is also astonishing—though everything including the one-time indomitable seeming Roman Empire had to come to an end. But consider a crowd of this magnitude coming mostly on foot, in the absence of any mass transit system. Where was the the parking for the higher-ups who may have come in chariots? And what was the ancient equivalent of the Hosteria al Gladiatore which currently faces the Eternal City's hottest tourist attraction?

Rome Journal: Via Venti Settembre

Via Venti Settembre (photo: Latupa)

The Via Venti Settembre is named after the Presa di Roma or the Capture of Rome. September 20, 1870 marked the final chapter of the Risorgimento when Rome finally became part of a unified Italy. This street in downtown Rome runs past one of the great presidential palaces on the Quirinale which itself leads to the Piazza Venezia with its famous, Wedding Cake, the Victor Emmanuelle monument. For a street marking a liberation, it’s actually dour with lines of dark government buildings whose entrance ways are patrolled by machine gun carrying soldiers. A few blocks down on the other side is the Piazza Repubblica and Termini, the central train station in Rome. In between Termini and the Place Repubblica are green bookstalls some of which display old style porn magazines (remember them) and videos. The side streets leading to and away from Termini are filled with cheap tourist hotels and there's a McDonald’s’s on the nearby Via Nazionale. There are even some Thai massage parlors whose windows are filled with girls at rush hour and you keep waiting to come upon an Italian version of Graham Greene's Pinkie Brown from Brighton Rock, lurking in the shadows.  The air of squalor and misery is only mitigated by Bernini’s “The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa” which stands in the nearby Santa Maria della Vittoria like a beacon of transcendence.