‘[Rome] if you want to*’

‘[Rome] if you want to*’

Topics discussed: Immersive Travel, Yoga, Mobile Phone Surrender, A Spat with God, House of Leaves, High-Stakes Parenting, Italian Fashion, Graffiti in San Lorenzo, Dreams of the Opera

There are certain people who travel easily with me; most people don’t. As soon as I get out of the United States I avoid other Americans. I’ve got nothing against anyone, I just get to hang out with Americans all the time at home. If I am in Italy, I want to be with Italians. The opportunity to learn some of the language, and maybe make some local friends, are really my only priorities. Of course a lot of this gets accomplished in dive bars. I always find out where the locals are drinking and install myself amongst them. Danger schmanger. If the first thing you do is make friends with the scariest people in town, there’s nothing left to worry about. This obscure traveling tip is not available in any guidebook. Lately, yoga has been handy for social ice-breaking as well.

In Sorrento I lucked into a studio housed in an underground room made of stone. I’m not sure how old the space/cave is. Wouldn’t shock me if it has been around for 2000 years. Everything else dates back that long. All the classes were in Italian [awesome trick for picking up vocabulary if you practice]. It was close to Thanksgiving and Sorrento was pretty empty. I can’t guarantee that the experience that I had there would be easy to duplicate. I was the only American in that class, and the instructor was under the impression that I was from Spain [we communicated in Spanish in the lobby]. I’ve been into yoga now for longer than I sometimes care to admit. This was a standout yoga experience; taught in a foreign tongue, in a dark catacomb. The instructor helped me get over the language barrier and the dim conditions by providing a visceral experience that was completely new. She took hold of my hips and limbs and guided me in and out of the poses with a casual grace that would be hard to pull off in the United States. I won’t forget it.

When you grown up in the land of industry and commerce it’s hard to believe that a developed stretch of land has any business being as beautiful as the Amalfi Coast. There’s something much deeper at work in the purity of the appearance of the landscape. I don’t know anything about what life in Italy is really like. But I did have a very distinct feeling many places we went: no one was trying to sell me anything. The cliff trail out on the Amalfi Coast, sentieri diegla Dei, The Path of the Gods, is probably dense with hikers in the summer. In the November mist, my son and I had it to ourselves. It’s a stunning seaside trail that connects several towns that are perched on the shelf above the sea, literally daring the earth to break out from under them and deposit them in the Mediterranean. We got off the bus in Bomerano and set out for Nocelle. All afternoon was about watching lazy gray clouds obscure the horizon, as angled vistas of steep clusters of homes and terraced gardens floated like plush green islands in the salty mist. No one was in Nocelle. Literally no one. It must be a seasonal place. Walking the deserted streets, we acquired a dog. The dog led us to the twisting road down to Positano and we started the long descent. Eventually we thumbed our way into a red Mini Cooper driven by a resident of sleepy Nocelle. His name was Sal, he has never been out of Italy, but he did speak Spanish and we got to know each other a little as he banked the curves. After a warm goodbye at the bus stop by the side of the road, we stood with a herd of goats and waited for our next ride.

I introduced my son to wine on the trip. Whether or not this was a responsible decision is debatable. Time will eventually answer this and all other questions I suppose. He is fifteen and he is in a big public high school and he is cool. Alcohol is going to confront him sooner rather than later. My take is that I want him to be prepared. My first few turns with the bottle weren’t pretty. I’ve fertilized hedges and elevators with vomit; made a fool of myself a whole bunch of times. And I got off easy. We started with a glass of red, then two. Of course Italians don’t eat like Americans. It’s a long experience, lots of courses. And wine by the bottle, not the fucking glass. I don’t know what else to say. By the end of the time we spent in Rome the kid could pick up his glass by the stem after the waiter or waitress uncorked a bottle and made a short pour. He would swirl it to get in some oxygen, give it a sniff, and a snip. Then he would nod to the server, looking very professional, and we would proceed to drink the rest of the bottle like the gentlemen we are. If you are curious about what extreme we wound up taking this too, here it is: on Saturday night in Rome, under the waxing crescent moon, Zizi and I had a wonderful meal, and two bottles, at a lovely cafe in the square in front of the Pantheon. After dessert we strolled across the river to the Testavere. It was hopping. We played fuse ball at Delirium. After that we went to the locals’ spot, the San Calisto, for cheap pints. Outside on the street we met a couple of Ikea truck drivers from Tunisia. One of them was a palm reader. They spoke Italian and French. We had Spanish and English. It was more than enough to talk for a few hours. After much careful thought, I am leaving out the results of the palm reading. Things could have been lost in translation. What I think I remember is unreliable unto myself and therefore irresponsible to share. Be fucking crazy if what I do recall comes true though.

The Vatican is a powerful place and its power overtook me and it was there that I believe I did the most thorough job of proving to my son the extent of my eccentricity. Get ready for a summary of ‘House of Leaves.’ It’s coming up. For now, let it suffice to say that ‘House of Leaves’ is not the kind of book that makes it to the Vatican all that often. If there is a book that qualifies as being the polar opposite of the Bible, it might be House. I got a personal kick out of the fact that I toted a copy of it into St. Peter’s Basilica. If that isn’t enough, I dipped my fingers in the holy water and painted the cover with it. The kid’s eyes were rolling. Underneath the Sistine Chapel Ceiling I yanked the book out of my satchel and snapped a highly illegal iPhone picture of ‘House of Leaves’ in the foreground with God giving birth to Adam in the background. A picture of what I consider to be two of the most ambitious art projects ever undertaken; together. The original ceiling that Michelangelo did was completed in four years with a lot of help. House took much longer, and Danielewski didn’t have the Bible as a wellspring of inspiration, he had to go to a place that is harder to find.

Here is where things start getting pretty crazy. In order to understand, I need to get a little backstory across. The people who are close to me know that I have been plotting an exit from mobile phone culture. It’s not an easy thing to do. Believe me. I think about it a lot. So much in fact, that something had to be done. In Italy I was determined not to use my phone. No Übers. No Google translate. Etcetera. I almost left my phone in the car at the airport but didn’t. Oh well. That picture I took of House under the chapel ceiling, that was literally the first and only time I ever turned the phone on during the trip. My son was insta-jabbering all day with his mates. I was in Italy, and really digging into it. That was Thanksgiving day when we were at the Vatican. It was mellow [note to unsure Americans: Thanksgiving has nothing to do with the church, or Europe, they call it Thursday]. By dusk we had had pizza and were back at our apartment: a high-ceilinged, two-room suite with a rooftop deck. The doors were these three-meter tall wooden relics with brass locks that turned six deadbolts at once. Fucking Rome! I went to yoga on Vittorio Emmanuel, at a studio called Zem. I haven’t looked it up but my educated guess is that it’s Italian for Zen. The class was so cool. It was taught in English by an American from my hometown: Seattle. Although the crowd was totally international and I was likely the only other American there. 90 minutes of hot vinyasa and it was non-stop. In my row we were sweating so hard that my Turkish neighbor, Ali, actually asked the teacher for a life preserver. It was so fucking funny. Ali had recently wrapped up grad school. Before entering [presumably] the Turkish work force, he was sowing his oats in Rome. He told me he was in the midst of the best portion of his life. Done with grad school. No job. Just doing yoga and hanging out. I admired that he was so present in a nice moment of his life. I hope he knows it doesn’t have to be all downhill after. I would have a hard time soldiering on if I didn’t feel like there was at least hope that my finest moments were still in front of me. After that class I had a long dinner with the kid and then I left him back at the apartment. I went out to meet Ali at San Calisto. It was a fun night. I’m not going to try and relate it. Trust me. I wound up back at the apartment at 2:30 with Modo, a friend I made from Senegal. I’ll be honest, he probably lives on the streets. Modo is also a polyglot and an empath and a very cool guy. We smoked one of those vile things that Europeans roll that are mostly tobacco with a scant amount of hash tossed in. I have never liked one of these. Nor have I ever turned down a hit of one. Someday I hope to have a better understanding of myself. Apparently I am willing to sacrifice the body to continue energy cycling with people [hopefully my mom will buy that]. At breakfast I realized that my phone was gone and it stressed me out. An hour later I was admonishing myself for caring. The following morning I found myself [on a Sunday, mind you] atop the monument to Vittorio Emmanuel with all of Rome laid out before me. There were about a dozen other people up there. It was early. All of the other people had phones out. No nice cameras. All phones. I felt so blessed that I had nothing on me to capture that beautiful moment with but my memory. It was quiet. There was a layer of clouds that were broken in places and the sunlight was spiking through and illuminating some truly glorious creations. I was overcome. And when it comes to the phone, I convinced myself that God picked my pocket. Hard to blame the guy. I’m hardly loyal, and I did snake a shot of House underneath one of His most prized possessions. Every other thing on the phone was backed up in the cloud, with the exception of the picture that I shot in the chapel. In some ways God bested me. I lost the only cheesy traveler picture I set out to get. Only my fingers were in it. But I still think I won overall. I doubt He realizes I was looking for another reason to get rid of that phone anyway and He gave it to me. My plan has the Christian God’s support. Can’t hurt. Changes have already been made. I’m not all the way to total mobile phone surrender but I took a big step.

The restructuring of my approach to mobile phone usage is going to save me a thwack of money. More than $2k/yr. I assume the prices of operating those things will go up. Over the next two decades what will the savings be? Honestly, they could equal a Tesla. I didn’t buy a Tesla to celebrate. I did however get into some denim and leather. It was the right thing to do and I’ll explain why. The physicist and endearing spokesman for intergalactic truth, Neil de Grasse Tyson, embraces randomness with respect to his consumptive habits. In English: he is put off by targeted advertising. He wants to make his choices as a consumer based upon the random opportunities the universe presents him as he lives his life [this paraphrased opinion was gleaned from one of his appearances on Joe Rogan’s podcast]. I concur. I have sworn off internet shopping. In fact, I have sworn off all shopping when it doesn’t relate to absolute necessity [and food]. I don’t have enough shit to last the rest of my life but I am good for a while. When it comes to things like clothing, shoes, eyeglasses, accessories, toys, gifts, books, art, etc. I strictly impulse buy. I’m never looking and I’m always seeing. There is a specific reason why I adore this philosophy of acquisition: everything comes with a story. I find that everything that I own seems so much richer to me, and I take so much better care of it, when the moment we came together was serendipitous. ‘Check out this object I found on the internet, added to cart, and had shipped to the door,’ is an eerily ubiquitous and ultimately dull thing to hear. I like denim and I like leather. It’s true. My quiver of jeans is already pretty solid and Italy is well-represented [Diesel and Armani], although not my current favorites. I had been digging this Japanese Company called Iron Heart, and this Chinese Company called Red Cloud [burly selvedge fabrics, but hemorrhoid hostile]. Adjacent to the Pantheon I lucked into a store called Replay. This clothing store is modest-sized but so well-curated it might be worth a trip around the world specifically to shop at [I realize this contradicts my previous position, the store is that good]. Not every garment was cut for my exact shape, but the ones that were felt like pieces that I had been looking for all my life. I picked up two simple shirts [the kind I will get endless use out of], two pairs of jeans [those new school stretchy jeans, one blue and one black, I know they look tight but they feel like sweats and I now understand why the kid always wears these, he literally does do backflips in them, I won’t, but I could do yoga in them, and I’m coming around to the look], and one black leather belt that is woven and has a hundred or so small metal studs in it. It’s a badass belt and I will be using it to hold up my pants for the rest of my life. I am a little on the thin side and belts are always too big for me. I could tell this one was perfect for me the second I wrapped it around. It was 150 Euros [remember I’ve got the windfall from the phone bill I skirted coming my way].

Superlatives are some of the weakest words in the language; I try to avoid them at all costs. And then sometimes I find myself trying to describe ‘House of Leaves’ to someone and my tongue wants to default to them and I need to wrestle with it to makes it not. Instead of assigning Mark Z. Danielewski’s first major publication a reductive euphemism, I’m going to do something that is gutsier than you realize: I am going to try and explain it. If you are going to read House you need to get the fuck over yourself, and you need to get the fuck over the format right away. There are footnotes. It’s not a big deal. When one of the numbers comes up in the body of the text, look for the same number [or symbol] at the bottom of the page and follow the thread. When you have finished, go back to the body of the text and keep going. Don’t be lazy. Read the appendices as well when prompted. Two voices dominate the text. The writing in the body of the book was discovered by the voice that exists primarily in the footnotes. Johnny Truant is an apprentice at a tattoo shop in Los Angeles. His squalid existence is already dark, when his friend Lude takes him into the apartment of the deceased Carlos Zampano. The dead man was a blind recluse that had been working on a book|essay| dissertation???, it’s hard to say, about a documentary film that does not seem to exist. I’m still holding out some hope. The film is called ‘The Navidson Record,’ and it was compiled by Pulitzer Prize winning photo-journalist Will Navidson. One of the things that makes House such an intense read is that the lines between what is real and what is not become harder and harder and eventually impossible to spot, as the they are swallowed by the darkness. Allow me to give an example: Will Navidson [a fictional character as far as I can tell based upon my research] earned his pulitzer for a photograph of a Sudanese infant, starving and abandoned, and being stalked at close range by a massive black vulture. I saw this photograph after the first time I read House in an issue of Adbusters magazine. The next significant footage that is alluded to in the book is a short film called ‘The Five Minute Hallway.’ In this short film Navidson opens a door in the house and shows how it opens into a hallway that extends into the darkness. He then takes the camera out the door onto the porch and around to the outside, never taking the lens off the walls, and shows how there is nothing on the other side of the doorway but plywood, siding and paint. It turns out that is only the very beginning of the idiosyncrasies of the suburban Virginia house that Will, and his wife Karen, and their kids Chad and Daisy, were hoping to be the launch pad of a more serene existence. After a short family trip to Seattle the house has acquired a room that didn’t exist before they left. From there things get exponentially harder to grasp, as the house presents an infinite shifting void that Will Navidson becomes obsessed with documenting. The question of how to capture the image of darkness is well-addressed. As are the physics of echoes, requirements of ventilation systems in large internal spaces, dynamics of sibling and romantic relationships, etc. Like the dark void, the book goes off in seemingly endless directions. The old man’s commentary about the film reads more like a dissertation than anything else. It is riddled with footnotes of its own, all referencing commentary about the film or about topics referenced in the film. Some of these citations are from literary journals and other obscure publications from the 80’s and 90’s that are legitimate and many of them are a complete farce. Following every lead in this book to its end could be a lifelong endeavor. Perhaps the first sentence in House is worth paying attention to: ‘This is not

for you.’ I didn’t heed it. I’ve been obsessed with this book since it was given to me by a sneaky professor at The Evergreen State College in 2009. I’ll never get over it. I actually can’t relax unless there is a copy of it around. It doesn’t take long for the book to wrap its claws around its readers. It doesn’t take any effort to get invested in Johnny, Carlos, the Navidsons, or the house [and what dwells inside of it]. In the middle of the book there are pages with very few words and sometimes the words spiral, etc. It leads the reader through and it also creates the same unease that the house does, that space is shifting. If you haven’t read it I think you should. If nothing else it will extend your neurological capacity. If you are lucky, it might reframe the entire universe to the extent that your potential explodes in every direction; one day you will be able to blow a hole through the sky and leave through it. That carrot has to be worth taking a chance on.

A lot of tourists in Rome have a pretty lengthy list of things that they can’t miss seeing. There may be some irony here. Trying to see too much too quickly may have the unintended effect of not getting to see anything. Other than the Vatican, the only thing my son and I endeavored to really see, was a bunch of graffiti art in the suburb of San Lorenzo. This priority got us way out of the Rome that always has a lot of eyeballs on it. It was a special day. We took a lot of cool pictures. I am not going to pretend to have access to the technical vocabulary required to properly describe, much less critique, what is happening in the world of Italian street art these days. I can say that is an inspiring and energetic scene. Incidentally, I don’t have the vocabulary to comment on the art in the Vatican Museum either. I am bowled over by the scope of it, as well as the obvious passion imbued in a lot of it. In both places, San Lorenzo and the Vatican, we discovered pieces that were brilliantly conceived and executed by extremely talented artists. I’m honored to have visited both sites. 

I have already mentioned the Pantheon, but it is worth mentioning again. I discovered it by accident, looking for somewhere to nab a bottle of water. Because in Rome these breathtaking features are located on narrow cobblestone streets. There are no parking lots near and no one is hawking miniature replicas at the entrance. It is legitimately quaint everywhere around it. We liked to eat on the street, at a table in front of a restaurant that faced the entrance. As we ate and drank we could just contemplate the building. Intuition with respect to gravity is what creates the almost cosmic sensation. I know the math works out. But Goddamn does that ceiling look heavy. It was rebuilt twice in its first two-hundred years of existence and it has held steady for almost the last two- thousand. I was near the front during a religious service on a Sunday morning. I wasn’t allowed in but leaned over the velvet rope to get my ear as close to that music as I could. I am not going to assign adjectives to what I heard. Hopefully you have a chance to hear [feel] music like that sometimes in your life. I can still feel [hear] it.

By the end of the trip I was feeling like I had succeeded in getting a real sensation of the place and the people. I was not happy or unhappy about leaving. I like it where I live and I like my life. I also could have stayed there and ignored my life. Didn’t much matter. Our commuter train [poor choice and was taking forever], broke down in a small town within striking distance of Napoli and we had to take a cab the rest of the way in. Taking cars in Europe is brutally expensive because gas costs what it should. Trains and buses are the way to move about. In this case we had no choice. It was a Sunday night and we were hungry. More of that Napoli pizza that is paper thin, with a puffy crust, that is eaten with a fork, and a napkin that is tucked into the shirt collar. It is divine. More wine. The kid prefers white to red and with a blindfold on he can tell the difference. Not too shabby! His mom wasn’t too happy with me when we got back [because of the wine thing]. I’m not surprised. It takes the right kind of eyes to see certain types of wisdom. Some good ideas are counterintuitive and hard for people to swallow. I’ll get behind an unconventional philosophy if it is well-reasoned out and achieves some sort of benevolent objective. I wouldn’t do it willy-nilly.

Before this trip I was under the impression [privately, I never shared this impression with anyone] that I was going to make leaving the country a non-priority. I know a lot of people say they love to travel and I think that is so cool. I have done a lot of traveling and I am more in the mode of staying home at this point and working on some things that require a lot of dedication and concentration over time. Trouble is, there is something I would like to have done in Italy that I didn’t get to do: go to the opera. It wasn’t exactly the season and I don’t think I was situated near an opera house that would have been accessible to me. And my teenager has been very clear about having NO interest in attending the opera with me. I feel like this will ultimately be his loss. I don’t have any experience with opera but I did for a short while have a close friend that was an opera buff and he managed to convince me that there is something there for me. Maybe a return trip to hike in the northern Alps in the late summer, followed by a train ride to Tuscany, a shopping spree, and one spare-no-expense night of fine food and music? Pretty bulletproof idea.

December 29, 2019

Text: Douglas Brannon www.douglasbrannonauthor.com Photos: Zizi Smith

*The B-52’s

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