CHILLIN’ WITH FELLINI AND LUCINDA IN RIMINI, THEN HOME VIA ROME

The best thing about Rimini is Federico Fellini. He was born here and revisited periodically in his films, most notably ‘Amarcord’. A full twenty years before his death Fellini was already mining his memories for material, because for him Rimini was not so much a place as a ‘dimension of memory’. Ahhh… thank you, Federico, for foreshadowing me. How many times have I used that same phrase without knowing its precedent? There is a street here named for every film Fellini ever made, all in a row, even the ones where he served only as scriptwriter for Rosselini (e.g. Roma- Citta’ Aperta), and even some I’ve never heard of, curse me and my protracted periods of escape from civilization! Who better captured the zeitgeist of post-war Europe, especially Western Europe, especially Italy, the horror and sheer absurdity left to befall the world’s most advanced civilization after its mass fratricide and imaginary Maginot lines, henceforth only to be moved eastward to cordon off Slavic lands with a spur through Berlin? Antonioni maybe? Naahhh… Truffaut or Godard perhaps? No way. Bunuel maybe, but he pre-dates the war and includes Mexico in his oeuvre, so I respectfully avoid any comparison there.

And Fellini, as with Bunuel, accomplished his task without resort to pop music props or cheap shots across the bow of politics. He accomplished it through the heart, not intellect. Even my mother got it, may she r.i.p., though she never saw a Fellini film. When I compared our Sunday dinners to a Fellini movie, she got it. The concept that something was ‘Felliniesque’ was something that you just intuited; it couldn’t be explained. The fact that anybody could ‘get it’ is a tribute to our collective subconscious. The fact that something could be hilarious and horrible at the same time makes no rational sense, but it makes film sense, and it mirrors reality. Of course he had and still has many copycats. Get a group of Italian kids together and tell them to act like their parents and you’ve got a film right there. Of course it takes more than that to equal Fellini’s art.

But I’ve got more mundane decisions to make, i.e. do I stay or do I go? The weather’s good, so warm in fact that I have to open my hotel window to let the radiator heat escape. I certainly wasn’t having that problem across the water in Croatia… what was it… less than a month ago? It seems like a lifetime. It’s so warm I buy a gelato and walk down the street slurping it like I’d almost forgotten how. My hotel room’s okay, if small, but they charge by the hour for Internet. That grates heavily against my modern sensibilities. I don’t like to use Internet with the meter running. That ain’t surfing; that’s swimming laps. In countries like Italy, and many others with a technology gap, to get Internet with your room you’ve got to go to the most expensive hotels or the cheapest hostels. Go figure. So where do I go? Jammin’ Party Hostel, $36 total and all the Internet I can surf, right in the privacy of my room. That’s convenient. Price is almost the same, except Net instead of TV. There’s no heat, but that shouldn’t matter. Rimini doesn’t come alive until summer, you see, so heat’s not an issue except in the ‘aperto tutto l’anno’ places. Many shops and restaurants don’t open until summer. It must be zoo-illogical by then.

Of course the weather turns cooler the minute I make my move. Without sun this California beach playground quickly becomes an Oregon beach playground, sun burning off late in the day if at all. And hostels are pot luck by definition, so when the players for the Ultimate Frisbee Championship come to town everybody else has to move to a satellite location for the duration. It’s not like there’s any shortage of rooms. This town is nothing but rooms… and other tourist ephemera, e.g. beachwear, fast food, and playgrounds for kids. There are even British pubs here, one of the U.K.’s most famous exports, along with pot-bellied pub owners. They’ve also got automats here; remember them? You probably don’t if you never lived in New York City in the 1960’s. I never saw them any other place or time… until now. I can vividly remember that being one of the first things we went looking for during our trip to the 1960’s World’s Fair, like Mississippi hicks looking at fast food behind plexiglass and going, “Gawww… lee! Shazaam (two syllables)!”

What has all this got to do with Lucinda? Well, she was here; or at least her voice was, blasting out across the street from the most unlikely of white satin/chrome/glass eating & drinking establishments. I couldn’t believe it. I stood there and listened to “The way you move…” until it finished, and then got ready for “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” (and I don’t even like the smell of bacon; hate it in fact). It didn’t happen. It was just a one-off, but still that’s significant, to me at least. Surely these people can’t really understand what she’s talking about. I mean you can’t really understand what Lucinda Williams is talking about unless you’re from Lake Charles… or Nacogdoches… or Jackson… but still they get it. How do I know that? Because of all the diverse music to emanate from my CD/MP3 player in northern Thailand, guess which one always got a response? Guess. Lucinda won invariably, every time. Interestingly, like Fellini she also works from memory, relentlessly mining it for language and texture and nuance… but most of all feeling, just like Fellini.

So Rimini’s not SoHo, North Beach, Amsterdam, Berlin, Chelsea, the West Bank, the Left Bank, the Central Bank, Ginza, Gaza, Interzone, or any of the other cool hip groovy dangerous ungodly places in the history of the world, just a beach town with plenty of rooms… and oh yeah, they’ve got plenty of cheap Chinese instant noodles here, the sons of Zheng He having long since arrived with their fleets of Chinese junk(s). Between that and whole roast chicken for $5+change, I’m content… at least for a week. Unfortunately they don’t have blood (red) oranges, which I’d wanted the seeds from to take back. I’ve been saving it for last- bad idea. All they’ve got here are the navel variety. Why would I come to a beach town for navels? The tomatoes are good, no small feat for store-bought. They’ve got ‘that smell’ that you usually only get walking through the garden and brushing up against the leaves, maybe because they’ve still attached to each other by the vine. Maybe that’s WHY they’re still attached to each other.

Oh well, in a few days I’ll be home eating ribs (ha!) and making plans to do it all over again, some other place and some other time, in this case the Horn of Africa /Anatolia /Scandinavia. I’m on a roll. I got my ticket back to Roma today, so it’s just a matter of time until I catch my flight back to LA. Till then I’ll just watch the Frisbee championships and walk the beach and arrange and rearrange words as if I were God playing with DNA and… I just found out it’s Holy Week, Good Friday and Easter, the whole schmear! I’d have never known if someone hadn’t told me. You can’t tell it from any increased activity around churches or such. I guess that’s a sign of the times. All I see at the churches are obituaries hung up for notice. Happy Easter.

Finally on Easter Sunday I get a glimpse of Rimini the way it must look during summer, gridlocked with weekend revelers, general chaos and major mayhem. They claim to have a tradition of sunrise breakfast when all the previous night’s party fools chow down before going home. They also claim to have had a party bus shuttling people around the clubs all night, operational for the last twenty years, a fact they’re proud of. Wow! With ‘traditions’ like these, who needs degeneracy? It even starts to warm up a bit again finally. Maybe my clothes will dry after all. Temps are about exactly the same as LA on the western side of the globe where I triangulate myself, where love lies waiting if there’s a God. It’s supposed to be up around 30C-86F there by Sunday. YEOW! I know somebody who’ll like that. Then the day after the holiday’s over here, WHOOSH! It’s like a ghost town again, people gone back to work, and the gelato prices come back down ten percent, yummmm…

The Ultimate Frisbee championship is over and all the bozos have gone home to their own American and European countries, including Russia and Ukraine. Apparently the US won the big awards. There are miles of beach just waiting for the next holiday, then the Big One… August! I won’t be here, couldn’t take it if I were. Italians are like Thais; they like crowds. I don’t. Sometimes I think that the world is divided into two types- warm countries and cool countries. They talk on cell phones ALL the time; we don’t. We like ‘the other’; they like each other. Think beaches are ‘freer’ on the Adriatic Riviera, full of nude women strolling past you like Paz Vega in that movie whose name I can’t remember? Naah, not here, the only fur showing here is around the necks of fashion frou-frous strolling the shopping strip as the sun goes down and the cool night takes over. The beach itself by that time has drive-up campers jockeying for curb space as they ready the kids for bed and make sure the noodles are al dente. It might as well be Corpus Christi. I think the nudest beaches are in Spain, with an axe to grind against the Pope, or maybe a cross to bear. There was a funny commercial a few years ago where guys on the beach dreamed of America, where ugly women were forced to cover up. Tomorrow I catch the train to Roma; next day I catch the plane for LA. I’m outta’ here.

On the train I’m thinking I should re-think my previous attitudes toward Italy, and France too, after previous problems. France was not so much a problem, just an attitude toward foreigners or dissatisfaction at its own decreased status in the world that annoyed, but ITALY… now you’ve got to count your change carefully there. They overcharge and short-change to an extent that would make a North Vietnamese blush… then smile. Of course that’s in direct proportion to the number of tourists in the area you’re in, whether it’s high season for tourism or low, and whether you’ve been ‘made’ as a tourist. If the vendor gets a little shit-eating grin as he pulls out his calculator, look out! You’ve still got time to change your mind. I’ve had direct experience of this in Venice, in Rome, and even on trains, all in one week! But I’ve had no problem the past week or so in Rimini. People seem as sweet and nice as they could possibly be.

I knew if I waited one more day to finish this, then I’d have one more chapter. So when we pull into the station at Roma Termini, I decide to go ahead and buy my ticket to the airport for the next day. It’s €11. I put my money in the machine. It takes the €10 note, but eats the €1 coin, nothing showing in the count. I press the return button, but no luck. So finally I cancel and it spits me out a credit slip, instead of cash. *&^%$#@! Now I have to go stand in line, the very thing I wanted to avoid! There I lay down the credit slip and a €5 note, but the guy needs to see my documents for the re-imbursement, so I breathe deep, cross my fingers, and lay down my US passport. After the requisite signatures and flurry of button-pushing he hands me my ticket and a 1€ coin in change.

No way, dude. “Altro tre’ Euro,” I blurt. He feigns a look of surprise, like ‘Huh?’ “Ti ho dato cinque; resta altro tre’ Euro,” I assert rather boldly in Italian that may or may not be correct. He fumbles with his hands and change, and then thumps down another three coins. ‘Ha! You’ve got to get up pretty early in the morning to put one over on Hardie K,’ I think to myself as I walk to my hotel. Simple mistake or attempted rip-off, you decide. Then as I dump my change out on the desk back in my room I look at one of the coins closer. It’s a 100 CFA Franc coin, currency for several countries in Western Africa, but not much good anywhere else, almost identical in appearance to €1, just lighter in weight. Now I don’t remember the exchange rate, but I’m betting it’s worth less. Somebody woke up earlier than me today I guess. And this is Trenitalia, the national train company, for God’s sake! Things like this leave a bad taste. Welcome to Rome. Oh well, the rest of Italy is still nice, except Venice, same deal. I’ve still up-graded France on my list, and as fate would have I just might be going to those French-speaking CFA countries later this summer. This two-month trip came in at less than $3000, so I’m good financially, cost me more to live in LA.

The rest of the trip is uneventful. I go see the ruins of the Colosseum at sunset. I catch the plane the next day. Immigration and Customs are a breeze. Maybe they’ve got a new poster boy. There are rocking chairs in the Philadelphia airport. I rent a Mustang, see friends and run errands in San Fran. I catch my final flight to LA. I’ll hang here and TJ for a week then go to Seattle for the Seattle World Rhythm Festival. Then I’ll head for Ethiopia, go to the Selam Music Festival there, get my visa for Somaliland, Djibouti, etc., no big deal, just another day on the job. See you there.

ROMAN THOUGHTS AND LA DOLCE VITA

What can you say about Rome that hasn’t already been said a thousand times? I could probably think of many things but that would involve my usual themes of supermarkets, travelers’ constipation, TV and politics. I don’t want to do that, not yet anyway. Rome is better than that. Rome is transcendent. It may not exactly be the Eternal City as claimed for publicity purposes, but most places aren’t exactly what they’re claimed to be. New York is not the ‘City that never sleeps’; Bangkok is. Rome in fact was almost entirely depopulated during the Middle Ages, a far cry from its imperial glory days of almost a million souls, wolves finally entering the city walls to take up the slack and see what they could scavenge, just like medieval tourists, just like us modern tourists in fact, crawling through the piles to pass our whiles. Rome is in fact the city that tourists sustained. The Italian Renaissance occurred mostly elsewhere, especially Firenze, as did the growth of cities, Paris and London and Milan and all the rest. The ultimate insult was the Church itself even moving its headquarters out of Rome for a spell. To this day Rome’s only industry is tourism, that and government and religion. It’s NOT the eternal city; that’s Jerusalem.

Rome is a palimpsest, the waves of time washing over it in repeated successions throughout history, leaving silt and sediment and new soil for planting. Like much of Europe its past is its present to us, and it manages to keep re-inventing itself accordingly. With much of space already conquered, at least the easiest pickings, time is the new frontier, and memory is the easiest path. We of European descent know that well, hoarding our souvenirs today and selling them on e-Bay tomorrow. Others have other ideas. For all their past of ancestor worship and vertical blood lines, the Chinese bury all public view of it as fast as they can. You’d be hard pressed to find a traditional district left standing there. They think they ‘gain face’ by emulating las Vegas and turning their country into a Pai Gow pinball machine defined by its bells and whistles rather than its collective soul. Europe doesn’t do that, not much anyway, or at least not yet. Luckily for them America’s already done it, so that’s reason enough to avoid it right there.

Rome is compact. Save that one-day Metro pass unless you want to camp out in the ‘burbs, which is not a bad idea. With e-booking there are some deals to be had out there, since they lack the walk-in traffic of the rookeries surrounding Termini station. How does a room in a sprawling villa for $50 with breakfast buffet sound? TV sucks of course, at least until midnight when the naked girls come on advertising their wares by taking off their wears. That’s reassuring for young boys everywhere. That was always the urban legend growing up- the naked girls come on TV at midnight. Very few hotels of any price will have wi-fi and you’ll be pressing your luck regardless. My place claims to have it in the common areas but no go, ‘local only’, ‘limited access’, etc; you know the drill. I guess that’s the drawback of so much attachment to the past. The present might get overlooked. Maybe they’ll wait and see if Internet passes the one-hundred-year test. Any place that actually has it probably has some other serious disadvantages. I persevere. The time when I can write a travel blog to you in real time is still a ways away. In America it’s pretty standard fare for hotels and easy to find elsewhere for the price of coffee. South America’s not far behind. Elsewhere in Europe and Africa and Asia you can sometimes get lucky, even in places as far-fetched as Phnom Penh and Dakar and Port-of-Spain. I guess Rome figures they don’t need it.

Rome sprawls in time, not space. You can see the Colosseum from almost anywhere, and even the Vatican is not much of a walk. The map makes it look big, but it’s really not. Just walk until your feet get sore, then take a break, and do it again. You can see it all in a day or two. Imperial ruins poke through everywhere, giving the Middle Ages a run for its money. The modern era has hardly made a dent yet. What would it look like if it did? At least supermarkets seem to be making inroads since my last visit five years ago, so that’s good. You don’t have to buy your groceries in bars anymore. The only problem right now is the weather. Europe’s had a rough winter and it ain’t over yet. I certainly don’t remember it being this cold in Marseille at the same time last year. Maybe it’ll be warmer in Tunisia. I hope so. If it is, I may hang there for a while and practice my French. Like any son of Rimbaud worth his verse, I’m just looking for creative derangement of the senses, the better to find some unusual pattern of words or images that have yet to see the light of day. Unlike some others, I’d rather try it without the aid of drugs. I’ve done all that. And I’d like to do it sustainably. Burning out at twenty-two is hardly an option for me now as I close in on fifty-five. In other words, I want to get my trips with trips, hyper-trips to the point of illumination.

The problem with practicing French of course is finding a country I like that speaks it. It’s hard to learn the language of a country you don’t especially like, though Marseille last year was an improvement. If there’s anything more pretentious than Parisians themselves, it’s people pretending to be Parisians, e.g. Bonairenses. And though the Maghreb speaks it often and well, it’s still NOT the first language, and overhearing and understanding a language spoken among native speakers is the final test of fluency. My next option may be Madagascar, which still uses that colonial language, not odd considering it has many competing local dialects. What IS odd is that all those local dialects are Asian in origin, from Borneo to be precise, reflecting an ancient migration of probably humble proportions. Even odder is that English is now one of their official languages also, EVEN THOUGH NO ONE SPEAKS IT, at least not outside the tourist areas. I think they just one-upped Thailand in some category of wackness, though I’m not sure which. Sounds like my kind of place. Stay tuned.

My inability to master French in my two months in French-speaking countries is a sore spot with me. I did study for two years at the university basic and intermediate levels after all. I understand more Italian on TV with no formal study and less than two weeks in-country, at least equal to Portuguese, thanks to my prior knowledge of Spanish. Portuguese pronunciation deviates from the spelling almost as much as French, and if it indeed sounds like a drunk Frenchman trying to speak Spanish, which it does, then French must be like a drunk Portuguese trying to speak English. The Maghreb is interesting from a linguistic point of view, pure Old World, the linguistics of language acquisition, not abstract theory, the language acquisition of a prostitute with her eyes on the prize between your thighs, hot rize plus and the finest buns ever was, i.e. consummation and fulfillment and y’all come back now, dahlin’. The average Moroccan taxi driver probably speaks more languages than the average UN interpreter, though a footnote is necessary. Tourist-oriented vocabulary is limited, and I heard as much bad Spanish there as English.

These European vocabularies are all closely related, mind you, though also notable is their mastery of local as well as classical Arabic. The language they speak to me there depends on their shifting perception of who and what they think I am. That’s not code-switching; that’s chaos. It’s a trip. Sometimes I get so bumfuggled I forget which language I’m speaking myself. Of course English’s only legitimate claim to the international standard is its analytic isolating quality, hard to appreciate unless you’re Asian. People who speak half a dozen Asian languages can’t figure for the life of them why Spanish verbs have several dozen different endings, when only one is necessary. Don’t ask me why, but English is only lightly inflected that way. Other than that its only claim to ascendancy is its imperialistic status. It’s a mess orthographically.

I picked up a bad habit in the Caribbean, i.e. booking ahead. This runs contrary to the backpacker’s credo of spontaneous emission. When it’s time to fly, then fly. That’s a metaphor; flying is the problem actually, that and expensive accommodation. When you’re traveling overland, there’s hardly a reason to book more than a day or two ahead really, unless rooms are tight and dear. You can’t do that in the Caribbean. They won’t let you. They’ll call you on those fake hotels you write in on the landing card. ‘Happy House’ indeed! Then the room they found me was the one I stayed in long term anyway. That’s the nice thing about the slow season- rooms are easier to find and cheaper. Of course this slow season may last a few years. We’ll see how gas prices respond in the next few months. If the speculators get over-anxious they may kill the coming summer season in its infancy. It’s not entirely coincidence that huge gas price surges were followed by the Next Great Depression. Though predatory lending may have been the immediate cause, it’s all part of the gold-pan get-rich-quick philosophy of the son-of-Reagan Republicans.

Big news here is the Japanese finance minister showing up drunk at the G7 economic summit. Did that make CNN? I bet it made Fox. What else is new in Rome? Well they seem to have finally perfected the combination toilet/bidet, so that doesn’t have to take up space next to the bed like in France. This is good for those of us accustomed to the Thai system which has a rubber hose and nozzle next to every toilet. This was probably intended for the chambermaids, but creative minds couldn’t pass on that opportunity to stay clean and green. The Italian bowls even have the water jetting sideways instead of straight up the you-know-what-hole, so that’s even wilder (and easier on sensitive tissues). But I digress. Tunisia’s next on the list, on the other side of the Mediteranean, the crossroads which have seen Arabs, Turks, Crusaders, Normans, Romans, Carthaginians and Greeks all claiming pieces of turf in their own good time. To this day Malta, European to the point of Euro currency, even still speaks an Arab dialect, albeit written in Roman alphabet. How’s that for multi-kulti patchwork pragmatism? That comes next after Tunisia. Stay tuned, and pray for sun.