Las motocicletas

Or is it 'motobiccicleta'? We saw a lot of motorcycles and vespas in Italy, wherever we stayed. They seem to be ideal for zipping around those skinny European streets, threading through cars and people, and expressing one's individuality and independent spirit. There are millions of them in Italy, there are more motor bikes in Italy than there are statues. If someone asked me to name one sound only that would more than any other sound say "Italia" to me, it would be the roar of a vespa, rising in volume very fast above all shouts and horns, bearing down on me from nowhere on a previously empty street.

If someone asked me to describe one picture that more than any other sound would say "Italia" to me, it would be the backs of the heads of a long line of people, very often people who'd somehow gotten ahead of you while your attention wavered, while you turned to looked around in the vain hope that you'll see another door or a sign or some kind of indication that the line you're standing in is not the line you have to wait in to get where you're going, because you can't believe it, it's inhuman, they surely can't expect you to wait in that line snaking around the front of the building and around so far back and forth that you can't even tell where it really ends, and you're right, because they don't expect any human being to wait in that line...

Any normal human being would shake their fist and walk away, or stride right up to the door and demand to be let in, and wave their hand back at the line dramatically and then sidle back politely to let the guard fiddle with the rope barring the entrance while he talks to some annoying tourist who's face is red in the heat and exertion and covered in sweat and on the point of heat stroke and asking very politely if the wait is much longer because they'd rather pass out inside the museum but the guard doesn't know and the normal human being would look thoughtfully back at his watch at this point and look down the line as if searching for a familiar face and looks officiously around the entrance as if he's not quite happy with the security and when the guard opens the rope to let a dozen more relieved tourists into the front door and the line surges forward another few feet the normal human being, not in the line but definitely part of the group moving into the door now even though he walks through the door behind the guard's line of sight but so calmly that he's definitely with the group moving in or maybe he works for the museum don't you think?

Surely any normal human being would sneak in as thoughtfully, without causing a fuss, but there's always a few bastards who have to make a scene, and shout at the guards who are only doing their job, and demand to see someone, anyone, who they can reason with and who will see quite naturally that they can't be expected to wait in this horrible line of miserable suffering tourists, or there's the impatient aesthetes who turn away with disgust, sniffing their nose, and walk away from the mob without deigning to even glance at a sign - of course they can't fully experience the art among that crowd. Completely understandable, very reasonable.

But the thought that any thinking, feeling human with any sort of spirit or even a semi-functioning nervous system would actually just stand in the line - just stand in the line! - awaiting their turn like a stone, stolidly, remorselessly letting their feet go numb and their skin burn and their children - little innocents shortly to be dragged down endless hallways and browbeaten into a lifetime of pavlovian nausea and revulsion whenever they hear the word "art" - wilt away like fragile orchids in dry desert sand...why, it's unbelievable, "increible!" as they'd say in Paris, it's the very last thing they'd expect. What? they ask, you actually waited in the line, in your place? You saw no opportunity to advance? Surely the guard's eye left you for a few minutes at least? Your neighbor's never wearied, and searched the curb for a place to sit? You surely noticed the mother with the child who stepped on your notebook after colliding with you as you...you were sitting at the time? Why, she was in the same line as you, and took less than 30 minutes to reach the door. It is not a line, Signor, it is a river - un fiume, and you must swim! Or sink to the bottom, like a stone.

The Italia trip II

Before Rome, we stayed in Florence for a while and went to a lot of museums there and got our fill of the Michelangelo sculptures, even the tremendous and powerful sculptures in the Medici Chapel, Day and Night and Something and Something Else, which I'd been looking forward to more than anything else we'd planned to see, because I read about him sculpting them in a book while the 2nd movement of Beethoven's 7th symphony played in the background and I wept and it was one of those transcendent moments that you read about that only happen to me when I'm reading about them, and then not all the time.

But it was a let down because all these school kids were there in the Medici Chapel when we went, and the little bastards ruined it for me and I wanted to kill their teacher for bringing them because I wanted to hear Beethoven while I gazed upon Michelangelo's immortal comment on the vanity of it all instead of their nasty little squeaky voices parroting third-rate art history textbooks.

I'd also wanted to draw at least one of them, maybe Night, or Day, or the other ones, but I was too flustered and there was no place to sit. I did get a chance to draw the David though. He's huge! I made a funny joke; "If that's David how big was Goliath?" but I didn't word it correctly and it fell flat. I also had the feeling that a lot of grandpas had come into that very museum and made the same joke, and thinking that made a part of me die inside.

The Italian Sklog

The first sklog from Italy, drawn while we sat in St. Peter's Square, resting after our ordeal in the Vatican Museum; we staggered shoulder to shoulder with about 50,000 other suckers through endless hallways filled with monotonously beautiful paintings and sculptures and decorations and finally ended up jammed into the Sistine Chapel with everyone in Europe, looking up at Michelangelo's frescoes and not really feeling anything but an intense desire to leave and enjoy some fresh air (or relatively fresh air, as fresh as it gets in Rome, anyway). I've seen those images too many times to get anything new from it. I did feel an immediate sympathetic connection to the miserable souls depicted in the Last Judgement on the one wall, though.

I don't remember what else we did that particular day, it was the second day in Rome and we'd already seen the ruins of the forum and the Collosseum and I kept wondering what part of the ruins were really the ruins and what part had been slightly re-built, because I'd always thought that 2,000 year old ruins would be all stoney, like gray rocks, and these ruins had a lot of brick in them. Can reddish bricks be 2,000 years old?

It doesn't seem right, and I kept thinking that maybe in the intervening 2,000 years - everyone knows that the people living in rome would take marble and stones from the old temples and buildings for a while, and use them on their own houses and such, which seems natural, why not? And really, after 500 years, wouldn't they tear down buildings that nobody lived in? And if people still lived in them, they probably repaired them, shored up the walls, added bricks or whatever. So at what point did they stop taking marble and rock and stop adding brick and decide that what they had there were not buildings or a source of building materials or anything with any practical value, but were RUINS, to be preserved exactly as ruins, for future generations of tourists? What do you do with ruins? Do you try to re-build them and make a theme-park, or do you let them slowly dissolve, integrity intact?

The End Cameth Quickly

My 18 week attempt to profit by my artistic labours came to an end yesterday, without ceremony or closure, when I played hooky from the Farmer's Market for the first time this year. I didn't call the market people to let them know because I couldn't find the cell numbers for any of them except for the girl that insulted me during Week 16, and I wasn't about to call that little pig (she behaved swinishly, I don't mean to imply she looks like a pig...I actually think pigs are cute). In any case, it had been raining on and off all morning, and the forecast actually mentioned snow...Snow!

People don't go shopping in snow until mid-December, and by that time if they have a list to get through they'll shop in any condition; rain, snow, tornados, glaciation, heavy machine-gun fire...

There was no point in my going - my people, my beloved customers, do not shop in rain and snow.

A part of me felt guilty for not going, and not letting anyone know, and that was the part that kept me awake for a few minutes early Saturday morning, made me think I might regret not going in, even produced phantom images of myself at the market, enjoying a deluge of magnet purchases. I disregarded those images as absurd fabrications, of course, and went back to sleep. I enjoy the guilt conjured up by the responsible, conscientious part of me much as a spicy food aficionado savors the burn of a particularly hot pepper. It made sleeping in Saturday all the sweeter, knowing that now I was one of those "irresponsible vendors" the market people had been talking about all this time, the ones who never called to let them know when they weren't coming, leaving a hole in the line of booths that had to be filled by god-knows-what kind of last minute crazy pottery vendor they had to drag in from the Waiting List of artisans that actually managed to be so bad that not even the Downtown Alliance jury would accept them.

I'd shake my head sadly when they talked about it, raging inside against the kind of vendor who would do that. That wasn't me, of course. I'd called both times before, giving them plenty of notice and time to find a good, solid vendor to man the line. But deep down inside I wondered, what what it be like, to skip out and not to call? Just thinking about it gave me a hinky thrill...Maybe I'd do it sometime, just try it out. Maybe next time they'd regret the way they'd treated my complaints about the insanely unreliable metal planks they'd been using as curb ramps for vendor vehicles to enter and exit the park, or maybe they'd wished they had charged me only half-price on my rent, since I was a serious artist and added to the stature of the market without really selling a lot and come on, they should be paying me to show up at that hour of the day and giving their crummy market a little cred!

The Twilight Market folks didn't give me the half-price rent either, although they did waive the application samples last year. An artist notices the little things like that.

And now, this last Saturday, I went to the other side; I didn't show up and it felt great, and I slept well and enjoyed the rain from inside the house, snug and warm, and thought about any vendors who'd actually shown up that morning in those temperatures with tender pity.

That's the way the market ended for me this year, with a no-show, I didn't make the playoffs and didn't bother with the exhibition games and now I'm free and I never have to do that again because I've failed as an artist and as a human being and it feels great!

I'm free to do what I've always wanted to do, which involves psychic powers and secret missions and free travel and government expense accounts. Art is a Fraud, perpetrated on both the artist and the artee, and nobody's done it right since the Italians, hundreds of years ago, and they had to lose an entire empire to do it, and I'm sure they'd give up the entire high renaissance and take the Mediterranean back if they could.

Notes on a Failed Enterprise part 1: Foot Lady

Years from now, or maybe even a few months from now, I'll look back on this summer with the same bittersweet nostalgia as an old washed-up minor-league ballplayer might feel, remembering the summer he got called up to "The Show" (that's what washed-up minor leaguers call the major leagues) and he played there under the bright lights for 17 days, before they sent him back down to the minors because he couldn't hit major league pitchers or something, I can't remember anymore of the movie, it was starring Kevin Bacon or Kevin Costner or the other Kevin. Anyway, in the movie he got all misty-eyed and looked so sad and thoughtful and adorable when he talked about "the show" that I wanted to give him a hug and buy him a brewski or something...that's the vibe I'm looking for, that's how I'll always feel about the magical summer I exhibited my art for the world at the Farmer's Market, when I tried to hit major league pitching and failed to sell enough refrigerator magnets to justify all the time and expense of making them and getting up at 6:00am every Saturday morning...I mean, for god's sake, Saturday morning! - the whole summer long, we couldn't do anything, not a damn thing! We couldn't even go on weekend trips, well, one weekend trip, seriously.

The picture at right is a not-very-well-drawn rendition of the foot massage lady who parked her hinky booth by mine one weekend; I despised her for various reasons, mostly because she killed my sales with her holistic health hoodoo, also for the boyfriend who always seemed to be hanging around her booth and who I thought should probably be engaged or living with or at least maybe holding hands at movies with her but who turned out to be her friend who hung out at her booth all weekend and sometimes watched the booth for her and bought her breakfast and then shook hands with her and wished her a good weekend which I found somewhat disturbing, as I did the thing where she'd sit there and hold the client's feet and talk to them, it reminded me of the thing Bokonists did in Cat's Cradle, touching feet with each other. The mental image stayed with me most of the morning, keeping me in a state of hysteria veering one moment close to tears, the next to uncontrollable laughter, every time I glanced over at the neighboring booth. And still the grim, silent "boyfriend" sat at a nearby bench, gazing quietly upon it all.

9-30 Market: A Crushing Blow

This week's sklog records a disastrous, emotionally devastating Farmer's Market last Saturday. I drew the picture in a driving rain storm, huddled under my cheap canopy, shivering and wet, occasionally throwing the sketchbook down to wipe the water off individual magnets, or obsessively move my display tables around in a hopeless attempt to avoid the water dripping all around the edges of the tent.

Occasionally one or two of the few crazed, drenched and hypothermic shoppers attending the market this day for their own incomprehensible reasons stopped by the booth to stare uncomprehendingly at the magnets for a moment or two before hurrying on.

The people who usually display interest in the magnets - lone shoppers, eerily quiet, with strangely intent eyes and alien mannerisms - were all at home cleaning their insect collections.

I discovered an amazing fact about the canopy - it provides less than half the cover - 49 square feet - as the more expensive canopies purchased by the serious market vendors - while claiming to be a 10' x 10' canopy. How? Inward-slanting poles, joining together under a meager patch of 7' x 7' fabric. Brilliant cost-saving device, unfortunately making it maddeningly difficult to determine what portions of the display under it would be safe from the rain.

At some point in the ordeal, staring across the gap where my northern neighbor Jim usually had his booth, at the welder who sells his idiotic metal 'U's to football fans, listening to the annoying chatter of the couple from the leather booth to the south, I suddenly became calm, and felt peace for the first time that morning, and decided that I would never do a booth at the Farmer's Market again. "No more," I said to my inner child, and wept, and curled into a ball in the comfortable canvas chair. I was a butterfly, and had to be free, and spending more Saturday mornings at home in bed.