When in love, go to Venice

and bring your wellies, if you intend to visit this most wonderful of laguna cities. Jan and I did not, which is just as well, as it gave me the perfect excuse of purchasing stivali pescatori (fishermen's rubber boots) to splash through the high tide. We bought our wellies in a charming household goods store in the San Polo quarter. This involved walking to the store's little warehouse rooms, where Gianni searched through big boxes to show us the newest wellie models. We then paid for our wellie selection, back at the store.

Breathtaking: the Ca' Rezzonico, Venice's 18th century museum palazzo, remains one of the most beautiful museums I've enjoyed to date (PS: You can look at tons of images of the ex- and interior on the web). It now has a huge collection of 18th century painting at the top, from whose windows you can wonder at the impressive panorama reaching to the snow-capped Alps, beyond the town and laguna waters. Simply wonderful!

Exhibition overload

Since 2009 began, for some reason or other, I have visited a quite extraodinary number of exhibitions. It seems as if curators and artists are only now digesting the last 10 years of post-9/11 securitisation of our living environment (airport security, anti-terrorism legislation etc.) and what it is doing to us, or with us. Let's start with "Embedded Art" at Berlin's Academy of the Arts, which you can take in by taking a 1/2 hr tour with a fake security guard in an arty bullet-proof west, who moves the visitor group through 4 cellar levels, pretending to be rather strict (don't touch this, move on, you can't go to the toilet ...). As you wonder through the make-shift exhibition space, you're filmed. This footage feeds the exhibits in the more formal exhibition rooms on the ground level. The photos from Pakistan, features on electric gun inventors and security gurus and entire wall collages of news footage and the like leaves you exhausted and perturbed. Next in line is "Manson 69" at the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, which invited artists of all hues to provide visual inputs depicting "den Schrecken der Situation" (situational shock; the horror of the situation). You'll see Janice Joplin with her face burnt out of the painting, a fantastic installation of military installations, rockets and a nuclear explosion. The artist Elmar Hess used cosmetics products to create the installation. Though this exhibition does not target post-9/11 terrorism and security-craziness specifically, it wants to make us think about the attraction and repulsion generated by 'extremes' - of which suicide bombers are but one example.

Simply overpowering is the contemporary art collection assembled by German industrialist Falckenberg, installed in an ex-factory in Harburg on the outskirts of Hamburg. It's a private museum, open to the public only when they attend a tour. The space has just been redecorated. Bit of a CostCo shopper of ContempArt, this Mr. Falckenberg, who was giving a tour to friends as we toured ourselves. The current exhibit brought together Falckenberg's holdings and those of a Spain-based collector, about to open her own museum. No theme to this exhibit, though some works would have fit perfectly into the art shows I described above.

While I'm at it; if you haven't seen the Paul Klee exhibit in Berlin, you missed a fantastic show. So much to see (250 works), I had to take a break and have an awful coffee in the Neue Nationalgalerie's cafe. Apart from the always breathtaking Kolumba episcopal museum space in Cologne, designed by Swiss architect Zumthor, the Wallraff-Richartz Museum, also in Cologne, offers the visitor a colourful tour of its Middle Ages-to-early 20th century collection: They have just redecorated the rooms, giving the walls a very well chosen variety of colours, which in my view fit the exhibited paintings very well indeed! 'Embedded' PC screens inserted next to the seats allow the visitor to delve into one of the paintings featured in a particular room. This way, I learnt more about Max Liebermann's 'women bleaching the washing on a lawn' (2nd picture down).

Though I humbly admit: I remember far too little of what I've seen. Which reminds me, as a family we took a tour of Mr. Balkenhol's wood sculptures of non-descript people after Christmas, who produced some truly striking, huge 'paravents' - and a very entertaining flock of penguins. 

ThinkBits No.2: Airport smoke

Starting on a light note; this make-shift water capturing device at Frankfurt airport struck me as quite contemporary art-sort-of-thing. Most amazingly, the airport company Fraport clearly considers it essential to document its ownership of the plastic sheating, itself surely the physical expression of a German norm (industrial standard). I just wonder why? (50,000 people work at the airport and roundabouts). 

Moving onto heavier stuff; Inbetween flights I met a chubby man in one of the cosy all-glass smokers' cabins, sponsored by cigarette companies and invariably inadequately air-conditioned. We got chatting, as smokers do. He was just back from Varna, Bulgaria, where he is involved in building a new shopping centre. Of course, I immediately asked: "Is construction still on-going?" and he replied "Yes", indicating that the financial crisis has not hit that particular spot on our planet. He didn't much care for Bulgarians, he ventured, so I asked why. Describing the dirt in Varna's backroads, he also informed me that Bulgaria was a sex tourism destination. "In the Sofia Kempinski, kids are placed in a row like a string of pearls, so the old buggers can pick one". Hardcore porn is standard in all hotels he's been in (No, I did not ask if he liked watching them). Waitresses in a popular restaurant chain called 'Happy' something are forced to wear very short hotpants. We finished our cigarettes and wished each other 'bon voyage'. I was left quite shocked that a new member country of the EU would allow child prostitution to take place, so openly (not that the hidden version is any better).

Roma, sabato, end of October

What might the tourist see and hear when walking from Trastevere across the Trilussa Bridge to Feroci, the butcher-traiteur just behind the Pantheon?For one, he might come across an elderly lady with a husky voice, talking to a negozio, a shop owner, chatting and saluting - and find her talking to another negozio up the street, doing the same, as he walks back. She must be doing her Saturday greeting tour, pulling her trolly, perhaps on the way to the Campo dei Fiori market; a village scene among all the tourists filling up the alleyways to and fro from Campo dei Fiori, whose market is currently offering 'puntarella', a chicoree-type legume, which looks a little like escarolle salad - very tasty, a specialty available only for a brief season and quite expensive (€15 a kilo).  Of course, you can spend a lot more at Feroci, which offers the most succulent stuffed zucchini, beef filet and mushroom carpaccio, mozzarella-filled fiori di zuccha wrapped in thin white bacon - no artichoke carpaccio today!

At 26 degrees Celcius, the tourist is slightly confused weather-wise. Could this still be summer in October? Friday night, everybody and his uncle had been hanging 'round the Trilussa Square as if at the height of the summer season; Roman youth mixing with the tourists. On Saturday, the municipal cleaners waterspray the stairs leading from the bridge to the Tevere, to remove the piss of all those people, who did not bother to find another kind of toilet. 

After a bout of shopping, a caffe is called for, as always, at St. Eustachio's, where the cashier, one of the bosses ? - explained that their fine own-brand chocolate bars are made in France. Globalisation and branding infiltrate the best of coffee places even in Rome. 

Just before reaching the hotel again, a charming and quiet oasis of an ex-nunnery just above Trastevere, a motorino driver cuts a corner right in front of me. He was transporting 3 boxes of fruit or vegetables on his motorino, one of them between his legs - what a sight! Antiquated somehow, but also efficient. At the hotel, the interior garden invites the guest to have a peaceful cigarette, whilst a lizard whizzes along the stone encasements of a flower bed. Roma, ti amo.

Time to go. The airport was as busy as ever, Alitalia is still flying. I sat down near the departure gate, where another Lufthansa flight was closing. The gate staff were calling out for the remaining passengers for Frankfurt, moving into the terminal, calling out for Frankfurt passengers by clapping their hands, as a bunch of Italians, dressed in blue sports suits featuring the Italian flag on their backs rushed to make it to the gate. No angry tones to be heard though, no bossing around, no; the gate staff were ultimately forgiving, understanding. Would they have behaved the same way with foreign passengers? Probabilmente.

Recurring Themes

Remember "Rebecca", the Hitchcock movie based on the Du Maurier story, where a world-weary Lawrence Olivier asks innocent and naive Joan Fontaine (what a name) at some spot along the Cote d'Azur: 'So what did your father paint?' - after she'd told him that's what her father had been (doing). 'He painted trees'. 'Trees?' 'Well, yes, one particular tree. He made paintings of the same tree. All his life.' She does explain this to Olivier, a la seeking perfection, an ephemeral pursuit, hopeless, of course. 

This scene is not an important one in the Rebecca plot, but I'm reminded of it when I  listen to Anton Bruckner's symphonies; repeated (magnificient) attempts at conjuring the same atmosphere, composing the same tree, so to speak. A recent biography tells me that's not the case, but judge for yourself. Listen to Bruckner's 3rd, 6th and 7th, and let me know how you see it, hear it, rather. In any case, Bruckner offers a delightful melange of the bombastic and fine, the brassy and violinistic, the lightly dancing and portentous, I ask you to give him some 'time of day', some time. 

Not quite sure how I believe this image from Urbino relates - religion, maybe? For Bruckner, yup, could be a match.