Over the years I’ve traveled all over the world and studied Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Modern Standard Arabic and Moroccan Dialect Arabic through immersion schools in countries where these languages are spoken natively.
For a full listing of times and places, click here.
Some of the most interesting experiences I’ve had:
Israel: the wonderful SPNI nature tours to Masada/Ein Gedi and the Sea of Galilee/Golan Heights
Egypt: everything in Cairo; the famous Pyramids at Giza
Denmark: the Roskilde festival, 1994
Brazil: huge street parties in Salvador; the parades of Dia do Axé and Lavagem do Bonfim; New Year’s in Rio; visiting Rio’s favela Rocinha; hangliding from a mountain in the middle of Rio and landing on Ipanema Beach; experiencing the breathtaking beauty of Rio’s natural setting, wedged between beach, sheer rock and forest
Spain: living in the twisty-turny streets of the traditional Macarena neighborhood in Seville; visiting the Alhambra in Granada, and wandering the Albaicin district; driving the high roads of Las Alpujarras, in the Sierra Nevada; witnessing a bull fight
Argentina: witnessing a huge riot [December 2001; it forced the President’s resignation]
Thailand: shopping in Chiang Mai’s enormous night market; sharing an apricot tobacco hookah with some unknown youths in a Bangkok street market; my first driving experience on the left side of the road – through the middle of Bangkok
Morocco: getting lost in Fez’s medina; Jamal-el-Fnaa and everything else in Marrakesh; riding a camel in the Sahara; the World Sacred Music Festival in Fez; the Roman ruins at Volubilis; meeting Moroccans and enjoying their wondrous hospitality
Italy: buskers’ festival in Pelago, outside of Florence; experiencing the sacredness of Florentine churches; wandering the Roman forum and ruins of Pompeii; marveling at the labyrinthine waterways of Venice
Belgium: discovering overwhelming beauty in an unexpected place
Turkey: enjoying the unearthly desert landscape of Cappadocia
Russia: booking a room in a private house at an unknown address in Moscow, over the phone, entirely in Russian
On recent trips I've been keeping journals along the way, documenting my thoughts at the time, interesting people I met and various experiences I had. These are by turns funny, sad, rapturous, thoughtful, ironic, and simply documentary. Much of the thoughtfulness concerns larger questions that interest me about how a culture works as a whole, what the connections and dependencies are between collective choices made in different areas of culture, and what really are the deep similarities and differences among cultures. Here are some excerpts from these journals.
Morocco, France, the Netherlands and Belgium, Summer 2003:
Thailand, Winter 2002-3:
Italy and Germany, Summer 2002:
Subject: Marrakesh, a little bit of burning man in morocco
Sent: Tuesday, July 01, 2003 9:56 PM +0000
... or perhaps burning man is a little bit of Marrakesh transported to the northern Nevada desert? In any case, I’m on my first trip away from fez, except the day trip to volubilis, and it's a biggie, eight hours by train each way. I’ve actually been here since Friday, and I’m leaving tomorrow; there never seems to be enough time to sit down and compose a message.
[At this point if I were a cheesy travel writer I’d be writing "ah, Marrakesh! Red ochre city of dreams, hippie refuge at the end of the train line, fabled otherworldly place of snake charmers, story tellers, charlatans ..."]
But in any case this is truly a wondrous place, and it tugs deeply at the collective hippie soul that runs through every traveler and every self-styled "alternative" type, no matter how jaded they may pretend to be. So much seems familiar to me, especially walking around Djem:a al-Fna, the central square in the medina full of all types of performers, perhaps the most famous square in the world of this sort. Every day from 6pm to about 1am it fills up with crowds who surround musicians, fortune tellers, transvestite "belly dancers" dressed in a sort of Berber garb that completely covers them except their eyes and forearms [and the best dancers figure out how to still be outrageously sexy], story tellers, henna drawers, "water sellers" [who are dressed in characteristic, bizarre costumes and mostly just hit you up for money -- I’ve never actually seen any of them selling any water], etc. many of them can be [in typical Moroccan style] extremely aggressive, like the henna drawer who ran up, grabbed my hand and refused to let go till she had managed to draw a squiggly scorpion between my thumb and forefinger -- and then demanded money, of course.
So many things, even the air itself, conjure up memories of burning man -- same climate, quite hot during the day but turning cool at night; plumes of smoke in the air, visible from far away, coming from all the food vendors grilling shish kebabs and such; the incessant hum of generators; the incongruous lights everywhere vying for attention with each other; etc. add in the huge nearby Koutoubia mosque issuing calls to prayer five times a day, the souqs just to the north of the main square with colorful layouts of spices, leathers, pottery, and myriad other things, and the still-strong traditional garb so visible here [even more so than in fez], and it makes for a magical atmosphere. It’s no wonder to me that this place was on the "hippie trail" of the 60's, along with Istanbul, Kabul and Katmandu.
Overall there's a much more comfortable feeling here than in fez, and I really understand now why my guidebook keeps talking about how closed-off and difficult to penetrate fez is. Walking down the wide pedestrian mall outside my hotel in the medina I could easily believe I’m in Europe, with the shops selling clothes, the cafes, the stylish-looking people walking down the street, the foreigners everywhere, etc. in comparison, hardly any street in the fez medina is wider than about three car widths, and you *NEVER* see women wearing tank tops and hardly ever see foreigners at all. Life nearly stops in fez after 9pm, but there's tons of activity on the streets in Marrakesh till 2am or so.
Subject: first observations on morocco
Sent: Monday, June 02, 2003 7:01 PM +0000
The women here have a strange -- and annoying -- way of speaking. It’s pitched very high, and loud, and jumps up and down between this already high range and the super-squeaky-high. Reminds me of how a demented mouse might speak! The men sound normal though; I guess cultural norms are at work here. (I’ve heard similarly strange things about the way that women radio and TV announcers speak in mainland china -- their voice starts out incredibly high and then drops steadily over the next couple of sentences till it gets more normal, then jumps up again ... interestingly this does *NOT* apply to Taiwan, where things are normal.)
Everyone here speaks French and I’ve already gotten in the habit of just speaking French whenever I need to communicate, not bothering to ask first if they understand. Of course, then some people ask me if I’m French! (And occasionally some more perceptive people have noticed how bad my French must sound and just responded in English!) Meanwhile my brain is tripping over itself doing the dreaded mixed-romance-gibberish thing; mostly, it's Spanish that wants to come out in place of French. ... et je vais por aqui?
There are unfortunately lots of people coming up trying to get one thing or another (i.e. money) from me, pretending to just be friendly. Some foreigners have described it as feeling like a walking wallet ... most of the time it's pretty clear what's going on, but not always -- this morning I ended up talking to the guy next to me at the cafe, and he seemed pretty friendly, but then maybe a little too much ... we were conversing about various things, he said he used to be a student studying Spanish, but graduated and now has no job ... he ended up offering to let me stay at his house (!) which seemed a bit strange, and told me he could find me girls to have sex with (!!) ... he said he's usually at this cafe each day around 10am and 5pm; I happened to be going by there around 6pm and saw him there with some friends and he said why don't you sit down and so I did. But the clincher in all of this was that after talking a bit he said let's go have a drink at this other cafe across the street or whatever; I said, hey who are your friends? He ignored me and said, so you want to go get a drink? I asked again if he could introduce me to his friends, and he said that's not important, I came here just for you ... at which I point I said no thanks and got up and left. Ick!
The problem with all this is that Moroccans are renowned for their hospitality and thus there *will* be some people trying to genuinely be friendly! Supposedly, in time the faux guides and other swindlers leave you alone, as they prey mostly on newcomers, and in addition you get better at separating out the friendlies from the nasties.
Subject: Moroccan culture
Sent: Friday, June 06, 2003 7:19 PM +0000
As for women ... many wear the traditional head scarves but most don't. I’ve only seen one woman actually veiled. Both men and women walk hand in hand with each other (i.e. same-sex) but you don't so often see a man and a woman together, and you will never see them holding hands or anything. Dating here happens only in the context of marriage. You do see women walking alone, but not after 9pm, and they usually walk with a "glass wall" around them since men here are not very well-behaved towards women ... cat-calls are common, and any response, even negative, is seen as encouragement. [Same goes for these annoying faux guides, ugh! A few days ago one was especially aggressive even though I ignored him. "I see you're a student at ALIF [I had my book with me] ... it's really dangerous in the medina, and confusing, and the official guides charge 120 dh for 3 hours, I’ll give you 50 dh for a whole day ... are you from America? Why don't you talk to me? You know, morocco is not like America, we're friendly and polite here, it's very rude not to talk to people ..." [these guys all speak fluent English and probably 5 other languages as well] finally I said in French "s'il vous plait, laissez-moi en paix" i.e. "please leave me alone" and he said "what are you, racist or something?" apparently this is a pretty standard remark, to try to scare people into giving in.]
Modern clothing is normal but the most provocative stuff I’ve seen for women is very tight jeans, and even that is not so common. Nobody ever wears shorts, neither men nor women, even when it's quite hot ... [this is too bad for me ... do I suffer in the heat with pants, or wear shorts and stick out like a sore thumb?] for men, most common is slacks and collared, button-down shirts rather than jeans and t-shirt. Sometimes you see men in jellabas (the long, traditional cloaks), but long beards are rare, and a real sign of fundamentalist status [NB Moroccans often call fundamentalists “long beards”] ... in fact, I don't know if I’ve ever actually seen them here -- except, ironically, in a few of the students at my school! (Who, from what I’ve gathered after talking with them, are definitely *NOT* fundamentalists! it seems they're just regular practicing Muslims from the U.S. who are going overboard to look Muslim.)
Subject: the allure of the West
Sent: Monday, June 09, 2003 8:40 PM +0000
So far I’ve found Sandwitch Florence, Sandwitch Venezia, Pizza Sicilia, Pizza Milano, plus Cafe Nice (France), Cafe Floria (Florida?), and "Chez Snack Maccarena" (Macarena is a district in Seville as well as that annoying song). Evidently the West holds a lot of allure here ...
Subject: the elaborate Moroccan greetings
Sent: Wednesday, July 09, 2003 10:51 PM +0000
It’s just now that I feel like my Moroccan Arabic is getting *vaguely* to the point that I can compose basic sentences and communicate simple ideas. I still haven't nearly mastered the greetings, which are incredibly elaborate, with a thousand different things you say (all involving "allah"!) in a thousand different contexts -- each with their appropriate response. (E.g. you go to order a juice. the guy says "b-SHHa" [to your health] and you respond "allah ya:Tik S-SHHa" [god give you health]. you then pay and the guy says "allah yxlif" [more or less, may god replace what you've given me with something better] and you reply "allah y:awen" [lit. "God help you" but the meaning is "good bye", used specifically when speaking to working people]. etc. etc.
Subject: second-world vs. third-world
Sent: Wednesday, July 09, 2003 10:51 PM +0000
Awhile ago I was thinking about first-world vs. third-world and I realized that morocco really belongs in a category I call "second-world". Brazil, Thailand and Mexico are in the same category. These are all places where there is a fair amount of development, and infrastructures that more or less work but are always in a state of semi-disrepair, and an economy that sort of functions but always seems full of unemployment and people just barely getting by. The next day I was talking with a friend from school and he made a comparison between morocco and Cameroon, where he spent a long time through the Peace Corps. Both countries were developed to a similar extent in the 1920's, but today Cameroon is truly in the third world. As he describes it, all the roads are horribly broken, the building are completely falling down, there is trash everywhere, people pissing in the streets, etc. he says morocco seems like a paradise in comparison! I realized I’ve never really been to a true third-world country ... perhaps I’m sort of proceeding in stages; places like brazil and Thailand seem plenty exotic for the moment, without the sorts of things that would be both incredibly annoying and extremely depressing. In time I may venture to these more out-of-the-way and difficult-to-travel places.
Subject: about Arabic
Sent: Friday, June 06, 2003 8:08 PM +0000
The tricky thing is that there are many Arabic languages, not just one -- [a] the language of the Koran; [b] "Modern Standard" [MSA], mostly the same language but with modernized vocabulary and some grammar simplifications, in the direction of colloquial speech; [c] Colloquial, what people actually speak and actually a whole slew of dialects that in some cases can vary as much as French and Italian; [d] various mixtures. MSA is used in radio and TV, speeches, classrooms, etc. and is pretty much the only written language. All educated Arabs learn it but few can speak it fluently. MSA is also what they teach in "Arabic" classes around the world -- and they usually don't tell you for a very long time that nobody actually speaks what you're learning. There is no standard colloquial language but most Arabs understand Egyptian since that's where all the movies are produced.
Unfortunately Moroccan is the odd man out, kind of like French vs. the other romance languages, and incomprehensible to Arabs farther away than Algeria. Despite this I chose to study this rather than MSA -- both are offered here -- because I want to converse with people, and from my experience learning Portuguese and then Spanish, I figure learning another dialect will be very easy. The more I’m here the more I realize taking Colloquial was clearly the right decision for me, and some other people here learning Modern Standard are starting to wish they were doing this too, as they realize that they are basically learning a literary language and it won't help you all that much here in conversation.
However, they are teaching Moroccan Arabic here using classical Arabic script [rather than a transcription using roman letters], which I really object to, for many reasons -- e.g. it's a much harder and slower way to go than transcription, and it's impossible to accurately represent the spoken Moroccan language, whose sounds have diverged a lot from classical Arabic. I gather, however, from speaking with my Arabic teacher at the Univ. of Az., plus various students and the intros to many textbooks, etc. etc. that I am decidedly in the minority. as is the case with all languages with foreign scripts, there is a tremendous bias against transcription on the part of nearly everyone. teachers as well as students tend to say that transcription is a crutch, and even that "it's very hard to learn", "it's useless anyway", "you will never learn to speak accurately this way", "you cannot accurately represent the language this way", "the native script is much easier", etc. when all of these statements are not only untrue but in fact almost precisely the opposite of the truth! [I heard the same things when I was trying to learn thai] I get the feeling there's a sort of mythology associated with a language's script, a refusal to believe it's possible to write the language any differently than it actually is, which gets passed down from teacher to student, and over time it's become an unchallengeable dogma, and it's futile to throw logic at it.
Subject: Amsterdam
Sent: Monday, August 11, 2003 9:53 PM +0200
opposite the mcdonalds is the miranda sex cinema and the strike gambling house and next to it is the erotic shopping centre with "continuous live gay video". welcome to amsterdam.
everybody and their mother has come here this time of year and finding hotels is a pain in the despite ridiculously high prices. it reminds me of how it seemed that every third restaurant in paris had a sign on it saying it was closed due to &quoasst;conges annuels". seems that everyone in europe (france, spain and italy at the very least) goes on vacation this month. it seems awfully strange to me that everyone here chooses to "get away from it all" at the same time, since naturally they're just going to find each other again at all the standard resorts!
Subject: mystical nights
Sent: Tuesday, August 12, 2003 10:33 PM +0200
i look around at the "bruin huis" (brown house) and the sign reading "de deur niet openen" (don't open the door) and feel like i've entered an alternate universe with bizarrely corrupted english. this feeling goes beyond just language, though ... there's a highly unreal, almost mystical feeling about everything here, especially walking around at night with fog everywhere, looking at the lights and bridges and canals and magical gingerbread houses and impossibly pointy spires of the churches, with the ding-ding of the trams going by and the bell towers playing music-box-like chimes every half-hour ... (it seems no wonder that this is one of the world's centers of trance music, as is playing right now ...) i think i've hit upon the source of this feeling -- the ambience here has been converted into fairy tales and children's stories exported throughout northern europe and from there into the u.s. i bet i would get just the same sense walking around st. petersburg in winter ...
Subject: Maastricht
Sent: Sunday, August 17, 2003 9:27 PM +0200
here i am in maastricht. up until this trip i had heard of maastricht only in conjunction with the european union treaties signed here, so i naturally assumed it had to be a boring and bureaucratic city like all those other places -- washington dc, brussels, the hague ... but far from it! in fact this is a beautiful medieval city dating back from roman times ("tricht" from latin "trajectum" == crossing, as this city is on the river maas). it also has lots of nightlife, which culminates in wild carnaval celebrations (carnaval in the netherlands??? who woulda thunk?).
Subject: Antwerp
Sent: Monday, August 18, 2003 11:21 PM +0200
what a strange name for a city, and located in a country that's the butt of jokes the world over ...
but from my few hours here so far it seems a beautiful place. it amazes me the amount of history stuffed into all these random little places, and the way they've gracefully (well, excluding places like ypres, which was wiped out of existence in ww i and then rebuilt from scratch just like it was) transitioned to an eminently livable, exciting modern reality. places like tucson have a lot to learn, that's all i can say.
i ended up at this nice b+b run by a woman who works as a sculptor and has her studio and gallery on the ground floor. i happened to arrive right at the beginning of the weekly hour-long carillon concert put on by the HUGE GIGANTIC HUMONGOUS church a block from the b+b. (called "onze lieve frouwenkerk" ... you'd think a strange name like that would be unique enough but in fact this just means "church of our lady" and is the name of nearly every catholic church in northern belgium and the netherlands. at least in romance-speaking countries they try slightly harder e.g. "our lady of copacabana" or "our lady of the three rivers" or "our lady of the big fat ham we all ate when we consecrated this church" etc.)
[NB I was utterly blown away by the beauty of the Antwerp Cathedral. I have never seen such a beatiful, artistic church, where even with the huge size and voluminous Gothic decorations it gave me the sense of a precious jewel rather than just a big jumble of excess. Compare this to the unappealing blockiness of Notre Dame or the sterile “big and old” feeling of St. Peter’s. The only other cathedral that could compare is the Duomo in Florence, which I fell in love with the moment I saw it and felt a personal connection to it despite its stark, unfriendly interior.]
Subject: wondrous Belgium
Sent: Wednesday, August 20, 2003 2:55 PM +0200
i never would have thought, when i left on this trip, that i would have found belgium such a beautiful and friendly place ... over the years i've built up a whole mythology about "warm southern countries" vs. "cold northern countries", so it's perhaps only to be expected that this would get punctured at some point. part of the charm of this place is that there is a consistency to all the beauty, and it's a bit more understated than a place like paris or rome (or even florence to some extent) that just shoves its beauty into your face constantly. some of the monuments in paris i have to say didn't really do it for me, like notre dame -- yeah it's big and huge and imposing but it just doesn't have the sort of beauty that almost makes you cry, like the cathedral here in antwerp does.
Subject: what is truth?
Sent: Saturday, December 21, 2002 8:51 PM +0700
the number of touts and other such people approaching you on the street is fairly ridiculous. the typical thing is to ask you where you are going, and then tell you that this monument or whatever is closed for holiday, or closes at such and such a time that's already past, etc. and try to get you to go elsewhere. i thought about this and wondered, would you encounter such outright lying in a western country? i'm not sure. but the idea of saving face is extremely important in thai culture, as it is in other asian cultures, so i wonder if they don't have the same attitude towards truth. for someone like me, it is extremely hard to come to terms with this, but perhaps asians have equal problems dealing with the western reverence towards truth at all costs. perhaps, for example, the attitude of "truth over face" leads to the rudeness and coldness of europeans (and israelis) in comparison to most third-worlders.
Subject: farangs
Sent: Saturday, December 21, 2002 9:01 PM +0700
one thing to add is the fact that they call all westerners "farangs", a slang shortening of "farangseet" == french. somehow this seems very funny to me. they also have funny expressions involving farangs. for example -- feet here are considered the lowest part of the body and somehow impure, and you're never supposed to use them for anything you could do with your hands instead. since westerners are apt to use their feet for all sorts of inappropriate things (e.g. opening doors, pointing at people), they call feet "farang hands"!
Subject: culture clash – thai vs. western
Sent: Wednesday, December 25, 2002 9:55 PM +0700
i have been thinking about the differences between thai and western culture. an oft-repeated observation is "in the west we say, 'the squeaky wheel gets the grease' while in japan they say, 'the nail that stands up gets hammered down'." this seems capture a broader attitude difference that stresses individual vs. society, and exists not only w.r.t japan but most other non-western cultures, it seems. e.g. in the west, we have a very high regard for private property and for individual initiative. on the other hand, i've heard that in new guinea and various parts of africa (and probably lots and lots of other places as well), money that a person comes by tends to be considered not that person's due but a "windfall" due to other family members as well -- at least that's how the family members see it. anyone who becomes well off tends to suddenly find all sorts of distant relatives coming out of the woodwork and expecting to be supported. and yet, in all these places there's much more family support in general, and much less of the loneliness and feeling of loss of place that is so pervasive in the west. it seems to be this difference that’s ultimately responsible for the observation noted above -- a higher emphasis on society also emphasizes conformity and not rocking the boat. i imagine thais think westerners have gone far too much in the other direction, and sometimes i think the same, especially when i see indignant foreigners yelling at a clerk demanding "where's the management at this rip-off joint?" (as happened this morning). why are they here in thailand at all if they have so little "slack"?
Subject: Catholic vs. Buddhist shrines
Sent: Sunday, December 29, 2002 7:44 PM +0700
i went today to a buddhist temple in chinatown. it is very interesting to me how similar in essence these places are to the catholic churches i visited in italy. both places have a wonderfully sacred feeling, quiet and peaceful, and even some of the same rituals. for example, people here give a donation to purchase some incense and light it at a buddha shrine, while saying a prayer ... almost identical to the catholic ritual of giving a donation to purchase a candle, light it at a shrine to jesus or the virgin mary, and say a prayer. they even talk about the miracles performed by buddha, and buddha's temptation by mara (the incarnation of evil), etc. etc. there is also a great regard for martin luther here because of his emphasis on buddhist-like beliefs in inner faith and such.
Subject: Thai script ruminations
Sent: Thursday, December 19, 2002 9:53 PM +0700
it's strange to be surrounded by writing in a script i can't understand. it reminds me of israel, although not quite so bad in that there's more english here. the other odd thing is that i know quite a lot about the thai script and the phonetics of thai, from reading about it in my linguistics books, yet i still can't speak or read at all. thai sounds a lot like vietnamese, and has the same basic form, yet it's been hugely influenced by classical indian languages (sanskrit and pali), just like english has by latin, and so there are all of these hugely long multisyllabic indian words everywhere. same with the names ... their script even has all manner of unnecessary extra characters to represent distinctions in the original sanskrit that are not maintained in thai, when words are borrowed. in same cases it's ludicrous, like the 15 ways of writing `t' at the end of a syllable!
Subject: the pseudo-English Thai advertising font, Thai English
Sent: Sunday, December 29, 2002 7:44 PM +0700
other interesting twists of language here are the thai advertising font, which is specially crafted to look as much as possible like western letters. it makes things very confusing, since i can almost make out words but of course they're meaningless. i've been trying to sort out this script, with rules like "the small a is an l, the small a with an extra line is an s, the small n is a th, the small u is an n, the backwards u is an m, the backwards capital B is a y," etc. the other oddity is the pidgin english here (which i'm starting to speak myself ...). "no have!" everyone says. how come no one says "don't have!"?
Subject: more about the pseudo-English Thai advertising font and Thai English
Sent: Saturday, January 11, 2003 9:14 PM +0700
thai english, as i've discovered, is different from the more familiar kind of english in that the phrases "i don't know" and "i don't understand" are missing, and "yes" is an acceptable substitute. if the question is not of the yes-no type, the proper thing to do is to simply give wrong or irrelevant information. (the trick to dealing with this ambiguity is to never ask a yes-no question.)
earlier, i mentioned the thai commercial font that makes it look like western letters. naturally, i began to wonder whether someone might make clever use of this. one of the major banks here appears to have "asia" in the middle of its thai name, but today i saw what has to take the cake, on a Lay's potato chip bag. "lay" spelled phonetically in thai is with a vertical bar for "ee", followed by an l (looking like a lowercase 'a') followed by a y (looking to me like a backwards B, but with a bit of work it could look like a y), plus a "cancellation sign" indicating that the y isn't really pronounced since this would be an impossible combination in thai. the cancellation sign in this font looks a lot like an apostrophe above and to the right of a letter. By extending the vertical bar on the left down into a capital L shape, with the horizontal segment of the L going under the letters just as it does in the normal logo, and twiddling a bit the thai 'y' so it looks more or less like a 'y', voila, you have the Lay's logo in Thai looking very much like "Lay'" in English. i've attached an image showing the word "lay" rendered phonetically in Thai, with the conventional appearance on bottom and one of the new commercial fonts on top.
Subject: the reality of “good” art
Sent: Tuesday, July 30, 2002 5:02 PM +0200
the vatican overwhelms with its art, decorating every available surface and stashed in every corner. it seems that nowadays every important building, no matter what its original purpose, is destined to eventually become a museum -- the curse of modern tourism. what happens when the whole world becomes a museum to itself? i could imagine larger and larger portions of all major cities getting frozen in time, unchangeable forever and ever. certainly that's what has happened to rome, florence, venice, etc.
something else i've observed, increasingly uncomfortably, for a long time, and which became even more apparent here, is that typically i simply can't tell the difference between the most celebrated artworks and the "second-tier" works that inevitably surround them -- and i've studied art for years! i can't imagine that more than 1 in 10,000 tourists, if that, can make such distinctions. basically, we all take it on faith that the indicated works are the most important ones. the explanations of why the works are so important, what you should be looking at, are not very comforting since the same things seem to exist in all the other works as well! i've come to the conclusion that the *only thing* that really makes these works so great is their historical relationship -- essentially, they were the first to do such-and-such a thing. but of course, afterwards, everybody else imitated them, and may have even done better on a purely technical level -- so it's only super-advanced historians that really have any appreciation of why these works are so important! the rest of us are just being spoon-fed what we should think. (of course, the other significant thing about many of these works is that, precisely because so many generations have been spoon-fed the same info, these particular works have become cultural reference points and influenced lots of other artists, writers, etc. but not all "good" works have done so, and many "bad" works have done so.)
this same thing about art does *not* seem to exist (to the same extent) with architecture, literature, or (to some extent, depends on who and what you're talking about) music -- you *can* appreciate these things intrinsically and see their worth. (of course, with music, it gets iffy -- haydn may have been the great creator of string quartets, but afterwards came countless imitators, and i bet 99.9% of music cognoscenti would fail the "pepsi challenge" if asked to distinguish between a haydn work they don't happen to recognize and an imitative work in the same style.) and let's not even talk about conceptual modern "art".
Subject: big and old museums of themselves
Sent: Wednesday, July 31, 2002 5:31 PM +0200
in princeton we used to have shirts making fun of harvard, with their logo on it and the motto replaced with "magnus et vetum" (big and old). this was my feeling upon entering st. peter's -- huge and big, and rather sterile. after awhile you realize that there are in fact lots of interesting things stuck into the walls of side chapels, and huge pillars, and such, but still it has this sense like it's mostly there just to be there and be imposing (which in truth was one of the main motivating factors in its building). once again, it's basically been turned into a museum documenting itself; it's sometimes used for services, but only the apse (behind what's normally the altar), which is itself bigger than most churches!
i really don't like visiting most museums precisely because they're so sterile and devoid of context. it's like the whole point is nothing more than to view these "objets" that have been removed from their context and arbitrarily jumbled together. even when there's some chronological/stylistic order, it's hard to appreciate the context. i really really think that spaces are there to be *used*, and this trend towards museumizing everything is just a travesty. perhaps this means that things decay faster, but so what? an object is just an object, no matter how important it is. things can be restored, as we have clearly demonstrated. i believe that no one can really appreciate anything except in its proper context. one of the reasons i liked visiting the churches in florence so much, for example, is because they're still being used -- most of the time i went to a church, there was a service going on, people coming up to altars praying, people lighting candles and making offerings, etc.
Subject: venice, a wacky, wacky place
Sent: Saturday, July 20, 2002 6:14 PM +0200
venice is really an amazing place. i couldn't really believe before i got here that a city could *really* be constructed in such a way that everyone travelled by boat ... something from the past that's maintained only for tourists, like the cable cars in san francisco, was my idea. but no, people really do travel exclusively by boats here! the way the city is constructed ensures that this will happen, and it will never change unless the city gets bombed into oblivion (or sinks, probably more likely at this point). every 2 blocks or so in any direction is a little canal in place of a street, and of course there are foot bridges (with steps going up so boats can go under) every block or so over the canals, so any form of transport with wheels is totally useless. this means there are NO CARS (or motorcycles, bikes, mopeds, etc. etc.) anywhere in this city -- pretty strange but wonderful and fascinating, since everything is totally foot oriented and full of an insane labyrinth of dead ends, narrow windy alleys opening unexpectedly onto plazas, passageways under buildings, and other such things that are endlessly fascinating to a computer type such as me. i'm sure i could spend months exploring this if i had the time, and have often imagined constructing cities just like this (but in three dimensions! something out in a space colony, for example ...).
alas, though, in the era of the car this unique way of life is becoming increasingly impractical, and the city has lost more than 2/3 of its residents since 1950 -- replaced by totally insane tourist hordes, although reportedly there are large sections of town very little frequented by tourists, and we should be visiting some of them tomorrow. (today we took a boat ride to 3 little islands in the lagoon outside of venice -- torcello and the confusingly named murano and burano. burano was easily the nicest, a beautiful little picturesque old-world village with houses in all sorts of riotous colors, and very tranquil.)
but there's a harsh edge to this place. it's evident in the history as well as the attitude of the inhabitants today. venice was legendary for its harsh treatment of offenders, bad state of its prisons, and its rough sense of "justice" -- very few trials, people would just show up dead in the streets every so often as a warning to others. venetians were encouraged to spy on each other everywhere in the world and report back any infractions, certainly resulting in something quite unpleasant. furthermore, st marks church, a bizarre, fantasy-like place that looks like a disney version of a persian palace on the outside and every inch of the inside is covered in golden mosaics, was off limits to everyone but the privileged until the 1800's and even those who were allowed in were strictly segregated -- women lowest, then men, then priests (in order of importance), and only the last got to see the palo d'oro, a huge (10 feet by 15 feet or so) altarpiece of gold and precious stones, considered the greatest work of goldsmiths in europe in the middle ages, which (naturally) is in the off-limits area in the back and facing *away* from the masses.
Subject: Italy vs. Germany
Sent: Sunday, August 11, 2002 12:13 AM +0200
it was interesting to compare the differences between germany and italy. the cultures are obviously quite different, something that's visible (although sometimes subtly) everywhere, in the attitudes of the people, the signs, the employees at museums, etc. the museum employees in germany, for example, are far more courteous than in italy (this may, of course, also reflect the relative numbers of tourists in the two places). yet when i broke a rule by using flash in the pergamon museum, a guard *immediately* came up to me to tell me not to do it -- he puffed his shoulders up and adopted this super-serious look and mumbled something in a gruff voice as he pointed to the "no flash" sign and then slunk off back to his corner. it was quite comical -- he was obviously self-conscious and trying to put on his best security-guard attitude. in italy, by contrast, the guards really would be cross (underpaid, i imagine), and most likely couldn't be bothered to rise out of their torpor, but if they did, they wouldn't bother to act "official" and would just scream at you and give you dirty looks.
if italy is summed up as "looks good but doesn't work", germany is "efficient but illogical". hence the bathroom that charges you 1.10 euros and demands exact change -- which of course you won't have with such an odd amount, so they put a fancy new change machine at the entrance along with an attendant whose only job is to point at the machine when people ask for change.