Invisible City: Napoli

See the monastery, beaten by water and frozen water. It is ancient, two months old now but several years in imagination and centuries in writings. There is the sink where rushing water and soap work to remove oil and pigment. Listen to the echoes of hymns off of white plaster, and you know all the words, and you sing along with them over the sound of cleaning, Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea. Hymn 100, and you remember it as a joke and a nuisance, suggested every week and sung every week because of its number and because small children love it. And now you love it because it is old and found true, and the thunder directly overhead obscures it but does not interrupt it.

See the fields of Orvieto last week on a warm day when disaster was announced and all were shaken and one was not there, and you were not to blame and everyone says this but it is not enough. Feel the brown cliffs carved away standing behind you and watch the wind move the fields so that they flow away but stay where they have been for centuries, used and not used in turn. Now they are used for distraction and comfort. They are far below and will soon be experienced but will not have the same presence unless seen from far above.

See the room in Venice where excess revealed what is good and the reminder was almost lost but was in the dizzying gold of the cathedral, and the water flowed around, beauty and undoing, release and entrapment so that your mind knows a new way to conceive of its place, and also your soul.

See the earth that is not there but for tiny islands until you walk out and find it to be there. Walk out.

~

I am reading Italo Calvino's book Invisible Cities, and it is excellent.

This past weekend ended two intense weeks of drawing, in which more than just my drawing changed. Without going into an inappropriate amount of detail, I will say that I realized two weeks ago that some aspects of my life were not true and good, and I began to work to change that. My drawing followed suit, and so Holy Week really became that (holy) for me. I started to turn a corner that is still being turned. And yet, last week something traumatic happened here (again, I’m withholding details because they are sensitive and personal to some) that worked to correct a negative influence on our program, but was still painful for everyone. Please continue to pray for healing out of this. So the last two weeks were full of intense work, spiritual juggling, and physical and emotional exhaustion.

It may seem somewhat strange, then, that I chose to go with my friends Jake, Jana, and Allyson to Napoli. This city is infamous for being dirty and filled with crime, home of Mafiosi and scooter-driving purse-snatchers. It is an intense city to be sure, but there is also a great amount of art and other cultural activities. I had been in the area two years ago, but only in the Amalfi coast region, Pompeii, and Capri, below the city. This was going to be a totally new experience for me.

Because we had come out of such a packed time, we decided to take things as slowly as we could. We arrived via train around 4, and hiked halfway across the city to our hostel, Giovanni’s Home. We of course had no idea what to expect from the hostel, since each is so different, but we had seen that it got great reviews and was fairly cheap. Giovanni welcomed us in, gave us water, and proceeded to give us a map, a book about Napoli, and loads of information about all there was to do in the city, with a brief history lesson for each thing. He drew on our map where we should go, which parts were dangerous, and where the best pizza was. He reassured us about the crime rates, which were on the whole fairly low compared to many other cities in Italy (Rome had 3 times as many reported petty thefts), and explained that out of all the killings that year, only three were not Mafia related. Despite that, he warned us against going into the Quartiere Spagnoli on the west side of the city, which has such a fine grid of tiny crisscrossed streets that the police simply cannot control it. It was kind of interesting later on to be walking on the larger street that ran along the area’s border, and have this dangerous zone right next to you…kind of the same sort of thrill that comes from playing with fire.

But back to Giovanni…the man is a saint. Not only did he provide us with all that help, but he cooked us amazing food that evening after we came back from looking at some of the major churches. He served us and the few other hostel companions wine and then pulled out his guitar and taught us “Funiculí Funicula” and played some American classics. We began to see why Hostelworld had titled him “most fun” a few years ago.

The next morning we basically just walked around the city…into an old castle, looking for comfortable shoes for Jana in the fashion district, stopping in Zara, looking at Mount Vesuvius while eating enormous pannini made of buffalo mozzarella and tomatoes. In the early afternoon we took a short tour of the Teatro di San Carlo, the oldest continuously active opera house in Europe (which, I imagine, means the whole world). It was absolutely gorgeous inside, six tiers of boxes and a stage as big as the audience space. Apparently musicians who are in high demand consider it an honor to perform there, and many have made it their only stop in Italy. We noticed that there was a Mozart opera playing that evening, and were informed that student rush tickets for 15 euro would be available an hour before the performance…upon this good news, we decided to accept the fact that we would be woefully underdressed, and do all that we could to get tickets.

After relaxing a little bit back at the hostel, we ate a quick meal of pizza followed by limoncello and walked back to the theatre to get tickets. Even though we were about half an hour too early for the student time, the man in the box office gave us tickets anyway, and we were able to secure a fourth floor box all to ourselves, stage left. The opera was Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio). The gist is that the main character’s lover, Kostanza, and one of his servants and one of her servants were captured by a caliph and forced to join his harem. The servant in charge of the harem is an evil man, the main character tries to get his lover back, etc. etc. The opera was actually one of Mozart’s earlier operas, and greatly influenced what became new trends in the German take on the form. The music was, of course, excellent, and that theatre is one of the best acoustically…as far as I could tell, there was no electronic amplification.

The staging, however, was updated to modern times, and was (as Jake likes to describe it) as if Lil John and Snoop Dogg had recycled the music and reset the stage. All the action took place on a giant revolving yacht (replacing the caliph’s house) placed center stage, which was pretty cool, but then the evil servant came out with five very scantily clad sunbathing women. From there it went downhill…the main character works his way onto the boat by bringing a bag of cocaine, and at the end of the second act and right before intermission, as the sun bunnies were gyrating to Mozart’s crescendoing strings, one of the women took off her top and then walked into the boat’s interior. It was so out of place and so unnecessary, and combined with the late time, we decided to take a taxi back to the hostel. Very disappointing for sure, but the voices and music were still excellent and the experience of attending an opera in a place like that is to die for.

Sunday morning we attended a long-winded mass at a gaudy baroque church (I missed San Giovanale), accompanied by Giovanni and Steve, one of the guys we’d befriended at the hostel. Giovanni took us to a pasticceria to get our morning’s sfogliatelle and cappuccini (sfogliatella is a Neapolitan pastry made with light dough and ricotta cheese, and are unspeakably delicious). He very graciously paid for us and went back to the hostel, while Steve came with us to the MADRE, Napoli’s modern and contemporary art museum. The collection was great, and had some more unusual or atypical pieces by some of my favorites, like Richard Serra (I had no idea he sculpted with thick cloth). The piece that stood out to me most was Dark Brother by Anish Kapoor. It was a giant very dark blue rectangle on a stainless steel floor…but all of a sudden your mind began to question what it saw, since it appeared that there was more to this piece. I suspected, but my suspicions were not confirmed until I asked one of the docents standing near: it was in fact a 3 meter deep hole, painted and formed in such a way as to give the illusion of not being a hole. Kapoor’s work is fantastic, and they also had another (simpler) piece by one of my current favorites, Olafur Eliasson. There was also a large retrospective of an Italian conceptual artist with whom I wasn’t familiar, Alighiero Boetti. His work was lovely, and spoke to me because it was all about grids and permutations of things, anything. I love those very simple concepts that can be carried out in almost endless different forms.

Upon returning to the hostel, Giovanni once again cooked for us: linguini with squid, died with the squid ink! The dark purple may not have looked the most appetizing, but I loved it. Definitely the most unique meal I’ve had here so far. After lunch we went for a final long walk around the city, and then had a long train ride back to Orvieto, late Sunday evening.

The whole weekend was great…Napoli, while admittedly dirty in many parts, had a tremendous beauty that the grit made unlike the “normal” Italian look. The streets were narrow, tall, and dark, with all manner of railings and balconies and sheets hung off the walls. The smells would cycle through trash to steaming sfogliatelle to old fish to clean wood to excrement to basil and garlic, and back again. The traffic was ten times more insane than in Rome. There was graffiti everywhere, but it was for the most part very artistic, and really wacky! It felt like a real city to me, and it was nice to be back in a truly urban space. Not only that, but the company was great. Jake is by far one of my best friends here, Jana comes from a classical schooling tradition and knows what to read and is up for a good conversation anytime, and Allyson is smart and fun to hang out with. All in all, a good close to the “semester.” You can see photos from the trip by clicking on this link (it works even if you don't have Facebook): http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=87030&id=537430582&l=249a37cfd5

Portrait painting with Catherine Prescott started on Monday, and we dove straight in. Everyone, including myself, has already made a great amount of progress in just these few days, and I like discovering that oil paints are for some reason a very fast and loose and just comfortable medium for me. It’s very exciting, and I can’t wait to see where we go with this.

Speaking of art, I’ve been reading a lot of different articles and such that I brought with me on art criticism and history and the like. As always, it makes me excited to read more by other people that these articles mention. I read a fascinating review of Vija Celmins’ work (which was a wonderful discovery for me) by James Romaine. He will be my main adviser/professor/mentor in my art history and criticism studies at NYCAMS in the fall.

Did I mention NYCAMS before? My friend Erin (who is here in Italy as well) and I found out a couple weeks ago that we officially were accepted into the New York Center for Art and Media Studies for next semester! So in the fall I will be living in Brooklyn Heights and taking classes in middle Manhattan, along with an internship of some sort. I’m extremely excited about that…it seems to essentially be like a semester of grad school in New York City while an undergraduate. The best thing.

Yesterday we went to Florence for the day…I’ll write more about that soon. For now, I’ll close this long overdue post with some images from my drawing class.

This is my final drawing, on three sheets...it's of a really sweet minimalist well in a recently redesigned piazza in Orvieto (the most modern spot i could find!).


Here is an image of our second to last critique on two separate drawings we did, a still life and a Caravaggio-esque chiaroscuro drawing somewhere in the monastery.


My Caravaggio drawing...

Music Part 2

I did end up going to the concert on Thursday evening as well, which was held at 9 pm in the same place as before. This time the same pianist as before accompanied a mezzo-soprano in four lieder from “Wilhelm Meinster” written by Goethe and composed by Franz Schubert. It’s been a while since I’ve heard sung German (in a classical music context), and I love it. The soprano’s voice was rich, with the perfect amount of vibrato (some, but not a ridiculous amount, which annoys me after a while), and filled the space and was well matched and balanced by the piano. I’m always a little worried when I consider going to see a purely soprano performance, and that’s probably influenced by most of those taking place in a college context, but from the beginning I was set entirely at ease.

One of the gentlemen in the crowd was the composer of the next three songs, which were very modern without being all that innovative, and so they kind of annoyed me. They were also a little destructive to the soprano’s voice. The really crazy thing, though, was that halfway through the last one, I began to feel off-balance. I quickly realized that everyone seemed to be feeling the same thing, and that the curtains on the tall windows were being rocked back and forth. Being in a large room about three stories off the ground during an aftershock (it registered as 4.9 at the epicenter) was unlike any experience I’ve had before. We’ve had other aftershocks here, but I hadn’t felt any yet; people asked me what it was like, and did it make a sound. I always expected to feel a sort of up and down vibration, as from a massage chair, accompanied by a rumbling sound, but neither was the case. Instead, it felt as though whatever was wrong with the world at that moment was inside you, that everything outside of you stayed in place but that you yourself were being gently moved back and forth; in the same way, there was no sound but what came from within yourself, not as a rumbling but as the deepest, sustained tone that could only be heard the way Beethoven heard.

The amazing thing is that neither the pianist nor the soprano missed a beat! (Neither did they when the guy in front of me couldn’t find his sharply ringing cell phone, and then sat and read the text when he finally found it…I wanted to strangle him) The rest of the concert continued without incident. There were four songs in Italian by F.P. Tosti, whom I’d never heard of, which were very lovely, especially the last one Che dici, o parola del Saggio? Following these were two songs by Brahms, Meine Liebe ist grun and Minnelied. They encored with a perfect, light song by Schubert, op. 32 Die Fiorelle.

Speaking of encores, I forgot to mention that the pianist and clarinetist encored at the last concert with a Gershwin piece, Prelude II. I can’t believe that I forgot this, because I really liked the piece. The way in which it was written, it forced the clarinet to sound more like a saxophone, with low, throaty sounds and sharp brassy notes, really remarkable.

While I’m on things that I forgot, don’t forget to go back and look at my Rome post to see the photos from it, if you haven’t already.

I walked back alone after the concert. This, combined with the impact of the aftershock and the more introspective mood that the music had put me in, caused me to write the first decent poem that I’ve written in a long time. You can find it here. It likely still needs some work, but I like it enough already to go ahead and post it.

Last evening was the Stations of the Cross procession from San Giovenale to the church in the Pzza. della Republica. We held candles with semi-transparent colored paper shades around them and followed the priest and a simple wooden cross, winding in a long, lantern-lit procession through the medieval quarter of town. Candles were placed along the route and people looked out of their windows high overhead as we stopped to pray and sing and walk onto the next station. It was a good, reflective commemoration of Good Friday, and I left with O Sacred Head, Now Wounded haunting my head. Here are some photos:


Today I got some painting clothes at the market. I finished my still life yesterday, and my Caravaggio drawing should be finished this evening.

Again, do not forget the significance of this week. Pray for me and my fellow choir members tomorrow, and be joyful in the good news of the Resurrection!

Music Update

Ok, so I was wrong...the music that we saw last night was Brahms, Stravinskij, and Poulenc. It was wonderful, we walked not into the main theatre like I expected (which is amazing, 4 stories of box seats!), but into a side room that was about three stories tall and painted all over the walls. Here's a photo I took with my phone:

The pieces were smaller, only for clarinet and piano. The Brahms (my favorite) was the Sonata for clarinet and piano in F Minor, op. 120 no. 1. As soon as the first movement ended, I broke into a smile, both because it was wonderful, but also because no one clapped! The first time I've been to a concert when someone didn't applaud in between movements. This reminds me, at this concert there was one of those Classical Music Aficionados that I love running across at these sorts of things. He of course sat in the front row, an older balding gentleman with thick horn-rimmed glasses and a tan plaid ill-fitting suit paired with black shoes. I know that he heard the most of anyone there.

The Brahms consisted of four movements, allegro appassionato, andante un poco adagio, allegretto grazioso, and vivace. When it ended, the clarinetist came back out to perform 3 short Stravinskij pieces for clarinet solo. These were light and playful, but also technically excellent, showcasing the player's great control. The pianist rejoined him after a small break to duet again on the Francis Poulenc piece, of which I was not as great a fan. Hilary loved it, though, as she had played it for her clarinet final exam. Afterwards, she and Heather and I walked around the space admiring it. I think it is wonderful that there in this smaller theatre is a space (or, I assume, spaces) for moments such as this, and enormous and lavish room to house the creation of a small piece of excellence.

Sunday there is another performance, purely piano, of Mozart, Schumann, Brahms, and Moskowsky. And tomorrow is a piano and soprano performance of Schubert, Brahms, Tosti, and Bianchi...I'd love to go to all of them, but I might just do the Sunday performance. It's so great to be back in a classical music context.

That was Sunday evening...Monday was another gorgeous warm sunny day. A few of us had a nap-time sunning session out in the courtyard, and then we helped host some neighboring small children with easter crafts and an egg hunt. Yesterday continued the culture begun on Sunday when we went to the Palazzo del Gusto, the Palace of Taste, for a wine tasting. We tried a couple different makers of the Orvieto Classico, which is one of the few whites that I've been able to get excited about. Even more importantly, I got from the woman running the wine tasting a bunch of literature about the association of 17 area wineries and other information about local Umbrian wines.

Today we watched the Sigur Rós film Heima on the large projector and sound system. Gorgeous. Do you want to know what true artisanship is like? Watch that film.

My drawing has, I think, turned a corner. We are doing "Caravaggio" style drawings in which we need to create, with srong light and shadow, an atmosphere of some sort. This is going well, and so is the light and shadow still life we are all working on in class. Now that the element of directed and intentional light has been introduced, I have something to be excited about, which helps.

Do not forget the significance of this week.

Rome and My Week

Tuesday, 31 March. Hard to believe that I have lived in this country for 40 days already…I just looked out of the monastery window and saw a flood of clouds sweeping out of the sky and through the tiny valleys, with streams emitting steam that rises up to meet the vapor in the air. The grey, wet air pulls out the greens surrounding us, making them cool and lush. It’s unbelievable that I can look out a window and see a small green hill, out of which arises a medieval tower partially shrouded in mist.

This past weekend was spent in Roma, with the smaller group that comprises my drawing class. Three full days of touring and, most importantly, living in that space has made me appreciate it much more than I had previously. I was exposed to a gentler, homier, more livable side, one of small canyon-like alleys and small candle-lit bars that connected me to my life here in Orvieto. There were even moments of perfect stillness and silence, solitude, only a hundred meters away from the crowded piazze full of gawkers and foreigners peddling useless trinkets and ill-gotten bags.

Don’t get me wrong – the three days were intense, a whirlwind tour of Baroque Rome. Boromini’s design of Ch. San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, right next to Bernini’s Ch. Sant’ Andrea al Quirinale. Drawing on the Spanish Steps. Boromini’s San Ivo. Group drawing of a panorama of Piazza Barberini. A wonderful tour of the Vatican collection; we saw Raphael’s School of Athens in a very humid room, another Raphael that I actually really loved (I forget the name, but it was an enormous oil combining both the Transfiguration and the healing of the possessed boy), an amazing unfinished DaVinci drawing/painting that was just as good (if not better) than a finished work, the modern and contemporary collection that contained some marvelous work.

But the artistic highlight of the weekend for me was that much of it was a search across Rome for one particular artist – Caravaggio. The Madonna di Loreto at Chiesa di Sant’ Agostino showed the touching humanity of a stressed and busy Mary receiving dirty pilgrims while holding a fitful Jesus. The Conversion of Saul and the Crucifixion of St. Peter at Ch. di Santa Maria del Popolo were incredible in the blend of monumentality and simplicity of composition and, as always, the naturalism of his figures. The Vatican museum held Caravaggio’s Deposition – the face of the central figure gently lowering Christ was one of the most compassionate faces I’ve seen.

There was, however, a Crime Against Humanity that occurred on this Caravaggio pilgrimage. Ever since I had seen the Calling of St. Matthew on the large projector screen in my darkened art history classroom last year, I had fallen in love with both the painting and the painter. Of all the art contained in Italy, I most wanted to see this painting. We stopped outside the Chiesa di San Luigi dei Francesi, which contains the three paintings in Caravaggio’s St. Matthew cycle, and Matt gave a half hour long build up to the importance of Caravaggio and of these paintings, and then we went inside. I was horrified to find that the side chapel in which these paintings reside was under restorative work, and that there was scaffolding preventing entry. Even worse, however, was that, unlike most of the time when paintings are being restored, instead of everything being covered by an opaque curtain you could see through parts of the scaffolding. That I could make out about a fifth of the Calling was like being given a crouton and denied the rest of the sumptuous meal. Utter tragedy, as you can see here:


However, the weekend was not ruined by any means. We had a delicious pizza meal in Trastevere one night, Jake and Josh and I bought a delicious cannolo pie one morning for breakfast (yes, a connolo pie; imagine a connolo in pie form, and that’s what we ate), and for our second evening Matt bought sausage which he baked, along with pasta, beans, salad, and bread. We cooked and ate everything in the guys’ apartment; it was one of the best meals I’ve had here.

Let me tell you about the apartments, or, rather, the guys’ apartment. Incredible. It was so large and so nice, we knew as soon as we walked in that we would need to keep it secret from the girls for as long as possible. Here are some photos (sorry about the poor quality).

We walked in the door to find this: Matt and Jake and Kelsie hard at work making the apartment smell delicious. Check out those sausages in the oven:

We had satellite TV that carried essentially the BBC News and a lot of Arab porn channels. Go figure...never thought that watching "Sexy Iran" would ever be an option.
Oh wow, look at Jake trying to be macho

Jake and I shared this bedroom.
Sick bathroom. We had two of these.
The last day we had some free time in the afternoon (after seeing Michelangelo’s Moses) before we needed to catch the 5 o’clock back to Orvieto, so Erin, Jess and I went to Galleria Doria Pamphilli. We had a great time walking through the old palace, which contains a private collection that is the home to two early Caravaggios, a beautiful Giuseppe Ribera, some Caraccis and Titians, and, the highlight of the museum for me, Velasquez’s Pope Innocent X. The portrait is fantastically awing, and it felt odd to be standing in front of the actual image that Francis Bacon refused to see in person, in spit of it being the basis for one of his best themes.

I know this is a brief and not very detailed account of the weekend, but to bombard you with endless description of everything would be pointless. You simply need to be here to understand and appreciate some things. I know that’s frustrating, but it’s for the same reason that it is better to be standing in the aura and physical space of Caravaggio’s Deposition, with your feet and head hurting and your shoe untied and the floor creaking as you step up to it, than to try and pretend that you can learn everything from it by looking at a poster website’s photo that’s two shades too yellow. In many ways this website and these entries are exercises in futility; these are my experiences and I want desperately to share them with everyone I know and love in a way that they understand as I understand, but it cannot be so. These are my experiences, and I am afraid that I am able to give you only the poorest of accounts of them.

Saturday, 4 April. I hope that the above section isn’t alienating in some way, perhaps it was the rainy and foggy weather that put me into that more melancholically introspective mood. In any case, the weather has cleared up beautifully, and spring is as exciting and lush as Boticelli’s painting. Thursday Erin and Jake and I climbed up onto two enormous rocks on the cliff face to watch from a dizzying height the evening settle on the surrounding hills and valleys; we took our passagiata up the Corso Cavour, met an interesting and knowledgeable British photographer, and went on to dinner.

Yesterday was the most gorgeous day yet. Much of the first half of it I spent in relative solitude, which was refreshing. This has been the first weekend with no trips or anything for a long while, and it feels wonderful to relax. I stayed in the sun as much as possible in a park attached to San Paolo, leaving with my head cleared somewhat by prolonged and undirected observation of the landscape that dropped away from under my feet, and by the peculiar combination of laziness and energy that the sun gives. In the later afternoon I went down into Orvieto Scalo with Hilary Meakin so that we could get haircuts, which was an experience; I have, though, the best haircut of my life, and one apparently derived from a D&G style, to boot. That evening I got to videochat with my dear friend Seth and his girlfriend Emily for a bit on Skype, and then came back and watched Once with good friends.

Today was also given over to beautiful weather; after lunch some of us couldn’t resist ordering gelato and sitting on the steps of the Duomo for an indolent hour of people-watching. Upon returning, I talked with Matt about my drawing so far. I feel as though I am at that point where I need to make some crucial decisions and discoveries so that I can move above the mediocrity that I’ve attained so far. I have not talked a whole lot about the drawing class…it is intense, and for me, frustrating. I’m so unused to being limited to one medium or method of making images; even without touching color in printmaking there were a host of exciting ways to make marks and images. Now, I need to relearn how to simply push black onto white with my hand and create. 9th grade was my last formal drawing course, so this is a struggle. In addition, my own preferences are so shaped by either minimalistic leanings or conceptual meaning that to draw a realistic still life that means nothing about life or will ever be worth remembering is a huge challenge. I could be satisfied with a solitary line on a large white sheet. I get bored easily and quickly with what I am drawing, and I draw slowly and cautiously. All of these things and more are enormous inhibitors of me just making a drawing. I am at the point where, somehow, and I don’t know how, I need to turn off my head and just draw the damn thing. So the past two weeks have been a fight for me, resisting what is best for me. I hope it gets through to me soon.

Matt showed us the work of Vija Celmins, whom I’d seen before but never really knew what was behind her paintings and drawings. She does massive drawings of things like the waves in a section of sea – just waves, no horizon, no boat, just the water and the shapes it makes. She obsessively draws the photorealistic pieces over months. I don’t know how she does this, but I feel like there is something in that work that is key to me learning what I need. At the risk of getting introspective in a sappy way, I also feel like perhaps the struggle I’m going through with drawing parallels some of the internal struggles I have with my own life and my own character right now. I’d rather talk about the already finished drawings than do them, and in some ways I view everything similarly. This is wrong.

Sunday, 5 April. Today, Palm Sunday, has been eventful in some small but touching ways. I’ve begun, with a small group of other Gordon in Orvieto students, to sing along with the choir at San Giovenale. We are rehearsing for next Sunday, but today we sang along with them (learning the songs as we went), and took part in the Palm Sunday procession into the church. It was a heartfelt service, as we stood for the reading of the Passion narrative. I’m definitely looking forward to next Sunday’s festivities, and the holy rites of this week.

This afternoon has been given over to drawing, which is going better. I’m not psyching myself out so much now. I need to go now, however, because Heather, Hilary and I are going to a Brahms and Schubert concert at the local theatre here in Orvieto…should be great.