Could you make change for me?

Despite the fact that he represents a doge (see ducal "corno"), this lion looks just like lots of Venetians when told they're going to have to change something.  Even if it's something dangerous and futile, it's change.  We don't want that!
Despite the fact that he represents a doge (notice the ducal “corno”), this lion looks surprisingly like lots of Venetians when told they’re going to have to change something.  Baffled.  Apprehensive.  Disbelieving.  If it’s change, make somebody else do it!

My recent silence would typically have been due to the winding down of the summer, the winding down of me, an annual process which usually is distinguished by….nothing.  Sloth, heat, tedium, what the doctors might call general malaise.  (The tedium, unhappily, is also caused by the endless, predictable procession of homicides, femicides, drownings, drug overdoses, fatal mountain accidents, political did-so-did-not, and miles of traffic backups on the major days of departing and returning from vacation.)  It’s practically a tradition.

There are usually some slight variations.  Today we read “After he slit his friend’s throat, he went out to drink a beer.”  That’s a little different.  Or the young man who was accosted by a prostitute on the street in a town out on the mainland who got fined 450 euros for the verbal exchange even though he turned her down.  The law says clients are criminals too, and it appears that even telling her no counts as much as hiring her for the weekend.  But on the whole, a typical 30 summer days, not so unlike what people experience in many other parts of the world.

By now, though, we all know that August, which is supposed to be the Nothing Month, was very much a Something Month, for the gondoliers, ACTV, and city as a whole. Which also explains my recent silence because (A) I was trying to keep up with the constantly evolving situation and (B) doing so made my brain seize up, therefore (C) we went to the mountains for a few days where my brain wasn’t needed for anything but maintaining basic life functions.

Returning to Venice, we immediately fell into the groove, right where we had left it.  There is a traditional sequence of events in this sliver of time, which involves lots of people moving ceaselessly around the city, especially in our neighborhood, not to mention the Lido.

Plenty of visitors are still going to see exhibitions of the Biennale; every evening, when the doors close at 6:00, we sit at our favorite cafe and watch the migration moving sluggishly from the distant Arsenal outposts toward and along via Garibaldi, in search of food, drink, and a place to sit.  I’ve seen a lot of really nice dresses this year, if anybody wants to know.

The Venice Film Festival opened three days ago, so although actors and fans aren’t to be seen in our little cranny of the city, there are plenty of badge-and-totebag-and-camera-bearing journalists around (a reported 3,000 have come to cover the festival. How could there be that many outlets in the world that want hourly bulletins about movies and their makers?).

Here's a Film Festival tradition I really like: the megayachts.  They're not for going anywhere, they're merely for parties.
Here’s a Film Festival tradition I really like: the megayachts. They’re not for going anywhere, they’re merely for parties.  But if you’re looking for a film contract, these boats will take you somewhere, if you’re lucky.

In fact, a number of traditions here are pleasant, even reassuring.  I enjoy the eternal cycle of seasonal food; right now the grapes and the warty, gnarly pumpkins (suca baruca, “the veal of Chioggia”) are appearing in the market. And I feel the onset of the Regata Storica, to be fought out tomorrow, and there are the signs in the shop windows selling new backpacks and school supplies. That’s the happy side of tradition.

Then there is the also-traditional way in which events have been unfurling since the death in the Grand Canal.  Everything that has happened since two weeks ago today has been as predictable as dusty bookshelves, but they are not positive developments.  In fact, they’re not really developments at all.

In the days following the accident, there was a mighty outcry from all sides demanding change.  That was predictable.

What is also predictable is that change is now being resisted with every weapon that comes to hand.  Life here obeys Newton’s Third Law, the one about equal-and-opposite-reactions. Newton’s Laws are among the few edicts nobody objects to, mainly because Newton isn’t around to argue with.

When I say “laws,” I am referring specifically to the recent regulations that have been proposed to establish order on the traffic in the Grand Canal.  Because even if you say you need them and want them, when you get them, you have to fight back.

The mayor and assorted sub-mayors and people who wear uniforms worked mightily and also rapidly to devise a new way of organizing the assorted boatly categories.  In record time, a 26-point plan was presented, and published in the Gazzettino.

This plan contained a number of dramatic innovations, such as collecting garbage at night, and requiring the barges to have finished their chores by 10:00 AM.

But this is the point at which the true, fundamental, guiding-more-surely-than-a-compass tradition took over.

The tradition is: I’m not changing anything.  Somebody else can change if they’re that dumb, but not me.

I knew the minute I read it that night work wasn’t going to fly.  If people hate working by day, which it seems many do, they would hate even more doing it by night.  Then the barge drivers said that working those hours would make everything more expensive. And so on.

So the very people who clamored for change in the heat of the moment have shown that they don’t want it.  They want somebody else to want it.  This is tradition!

People hardly had time to finish reading the list of 26 proposed changes to the traffic on the Grand Canal before the protests began.  The Nuova Venezia says:
People hardly had time to finish reading the list of 26 proposed changes to the traffic on the Grand Canal before the protests began. The Nuova Venezia says: “Limits in the Grand Canal, it’s a revolt,” and the Gazzettino says: “Revolution in the Grand Canal: Immediately there’s a storm about stopping the #2 line and garbage collection at night.”  I could have read these with my eyes shut.

I can tell you how things are going to go in the next few months, or perhaps merely weeks: Some tiny tweaks will be made, and everything will return to the way it was.  The #2 vaporetto is scheduled to go out of service on November 3, because it’s a high-season traffic-overflow adjunct.  The proposal to cut it earlier makes moderate sense, but it’s really window-dressing, because then there would have to be more #1 vaporettos to handle the traffic.

The “Vaporetto dell’Arte,” an enormous, lumbering, amazingly underused and overpriced vehicle, will also stop on November 3.  They could stop it now and nobody would notice, but it must be somebody’s pet project because it keeps on going.  Empty and big and expensive and pointless.  (The “pointless” part is a special ACTV sub-tradition.)

As for what everybody else thinks about revising the way things are done, Grug from “The Croods” put it best: “Change is always bad.”  As his son replied: “I get it, Dad!  I will never do anything new or different!”  Just a cartoon?  Maybe not.

By the staircase in the Palazzo Grassi, the original owner, Angelo Grassi, had the following phrase incised in 1749:  CONCORDIA RES PARVAE CRESCUNT, DISCORDIA ETIAM MAXIMAE DILABUNTUR.”  With harmony the small things grow, but with discord even the greatest things are brought to ruin.

One thing you can really count on is the instigation of new rules (otherwise known as "change") on the vaporettos.  The ACTV must have a team of people dedicated only to devising new and preposterous regulations which are almost impossible to enforce. But they take them so seriously, I don't want to hurt their feelings by laughing.  I might scoff, but I would never laugh.
Here’s a tradition that never fails: the invention of new rules (otherwise known as “change”) on the vaporettos. The ACTV must have a team of people dedicated only to devising new and preposterous regulations which are almost impossible to enforce. But they take them so seriously! Here’s the latest, in the so-called effort to eliminate freeloaders who don’t pay for their ticket.  This says “People found without a validated ticket on the floating pontoons will receive a fine.”  How will these deadbeats be found?  By whom?  The ACTV doesn’t have enough ticket-checkers on the boats themselves — they can spare them to roam around the city looking for unticketed people just standing on the dock?  Most of the world is satisfied to have people buy a ticket to take the bus.  Here, they have to buy a ticket just to wait for it.  You’re stuck in the rain waiting for your friend?  You have to buy a ticket.  You want to help your grandmother get her shopping trolley onto the boat?  You have to buy a ticket.  Hard as I try to grasp this concept, it just slips away.

 

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Petals of love? Petals of pain? Or just something from the Biennale?

IMG_4064 rose

I came across this this morning.

I’ll never know what happened, but my first reaction was to feel sad for whoever dismembered the rose and scattered its bits to the wind, to the gravel, to the pigeons. To feel sad for the reason why it happened.  To feel sad for how they’re feeling now.  To feel sad for the rose, too, while I’m at it.

But because I really, really hate feeling sad, especially that early in the morning, when the sun is shining, etc., I let my  brain wander around seeking other possible scenarios to account for what had happened that might make me feel better.

Maybe this is an original way for two people to pledge undying, eternal, infinite love.  Buy a rose and decapitate it.

Maybe she said, “If I have to choose between having a rose and having you, this is how much I need the rose,” and destroyed it and flung it away.  Avaunt!

Or maybe he pulled off the petals one by one and let each float down on her head, saying “I love you” in a different language as each one touched her hair.

Or maybe she hit him with the rose till it fell apart.  Maybe they laughed.  Maybe they didn’t.

Maybe he said, “If you ever die, I will rip away every remnant of your beauty and sacrifice it to the sun.”  (He’d have to have been moderately drunk if he got that far.) (However, I am not.)

I am not going to say that the petals were the color of blood, because that's just too obvious and trite. But they came darn close.
I am not going to say that the petals were the color of blood, because that’s just too obvious and trite. But they came darn close.

I’ll tell you what: I’m going to stop all this, and I’m going to stop imagining writing a poem, or a short story, or a one-act play, or anything else.

I’ll leave the subject — and the carcass of the hapless scion of the family Rosaceae — with two thoughts, either one of which makes me feel strangely better.

One — maybe it’s just some work of art from the Biennale, a fragment of improvised performance art.

Two — this observation from an unidentified person:

People say hate is a strong word; well so is love, but people throw it around like it’s nothing.

Or maybe there's just something about this part of the neighborhood that impels people to strew bits of red vegetable matter.
Or maybe there’s just something about this part of the neighborhood that impels people to strew bits of red vegetable matter.

 

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Those pesky permits, plus some creative parenting

I appreciate that Venice (well, San Giorgio, in this case) is seductive and irresistible and beautiful and everything. But it wouldn't have been less beautiful the next day. It's been here for 1,500 years -- presumably it can wait for a family to have dinner and sleep.
I appreciate that Venice (well, San Giorgio, in this case) is seductive and irresistible and beautiful and everything. But it wouldn’t have been less beautiful the next day. The city has been here for 1,500 years — presumably it can wait for a family to have dinner and sleep.

After I began to think about it more clearly (that is to say, after I thought about it in the mountains, where we just went for four days, breathing air that was cool and dry enough to resuscitate my mental processes), I realized that I made a small miscalculation in the payday for the police.

I’m referring to the extra paydays they gave themselves by forging permits and whatever else they were doing to help eager immigrants make it through the bureaucracy.

Yes, each of the accused maintainers of public order did indeed receive 300 euros for finagling the permit, which seemed to my super-saturated brain to be pitifully small.

But now I realize what sharp readers have long since understood: It was 300 euros multiplied by God knows how many times they orbited the cash register each day.  Each week.  Each month.

Before long, it won’t be only God who knows what the total came to.  I presume a phalanx of lawyers and judges is already pounding its calculators.

Not me.  I don’t care anymore.  I’m on to other things.   I’m more interested now in the German couple who drove their camper  1,026 km/637 miles from Dresden to Cavallino-Treporti the other day.  Even though the trip probably took them ten hours, and most likely more, when they got there the first thing they wanted to do was to get on the motonave and go to Venice.  How romantic, how beautiful.  And how inconvenient that their ten-year-old daughter dug in her heels at yet another trek before the day could finally be over.

Nothing daunted, her parents locked her inside the camper.  Then they went off on their own, feeling fine about her being fine, except she wasn’t.

She got out of the camper, couldn’t get back in, became distraught, and was collected by a sympathetic passerby who took her to everyone’s favorite caretakers, the Carabinieri.  Who were waiting for her parents at midnight when they got off the boat from Venice.  To present them with the formal accusation of abandonment of a minor.

Mann kann nicht alles unter einen Hut bringen, as they say in the Vaterland.  You can’t put everything under one hat.  Neither can you have everything you want, including a child-free jaunt to Venice whenever you feel like it, no matter where you might be inclined to put it.

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Summer glimpses

I don't know why he's looking so lugubrious. At least they get to lie on ice.
I don’t know why he has to look so hangdog. At least he gets to lie on ice.

Laboring under the phenomenal force of the combined heat and humidity which have been oppressing us (Italy as a whole, but I take all this personally), I have slowed my blogging efforts, as has probably already become evident.  We have had two successive heat waves — ours come from Algeria, if that tells you anything — and the names are indicative: “Charon” and “Styx.”  You know those animals that only move once every few months when they have to eat something?  That would be us.

Having now pled the “Smothering Heat Wave” defense, I will proceed.

On a normal day, I would now be catching you up on a lot of stuff that’s been going on in and around the old most-beautiful-city-in-the-world.  None of which resembles much of what you could call beautiful.  Anybody who hasn’t managed to get to the beach or the mountains appears to be taking it out on the rest of the world.

Anyway, since my energy has to be dedicated to maintaining my life-sustaining physical functions — nothing left over for such frivolity as scorn and umbrage — I will give only a smattering of headlines from today’s Gazzettino.  I will then try to cool us all off with some views that show that there are still plenty of glimpses around here that make me smile.

National news:

Kashetu "Cecile" Kyenge is not only Minister for Integration, but also a doctor.  I think everybody in the Northern League should be forced to go to her for their myopia.  And possibly cataract operations.
Kashetu “Cecile” Kyenge is not only Minister for Integration, but also a doctor specializing in ophthalmology. I think everybody in the Northern League should be forced to go to her for their myopia. And possibly cataract operations. Too bad she’s not a brain surgeon. (Photo: Provincia di Modena)

Cecile Kyenge, a Congolese-born doctor and only months-long Minister for Integration, and Italy’s first African-Italian minister, has been working out on a sort of political and human Parkour course composed of a seemingly endless series of racist insults from assorted members of the extreme right-wing Northern League.

The process goes like this: The politician says something repulsive (such as comparing her to an orangutan), other politicians indignantly reprimand him, he offers a sort of non-apology along the lines of “I regret if I said anything that might have been construed as offensive” (or “misunderstood,” or “taken out of context,” or “a private communication that was somehow made public,” etc.).  At least five Leaguers at various levels have contributed to the stringing of this uncharm-bracelet of abuse regarding her color or her religion.  Some have been expelled from the party, but more just keep coming up.  It’s like some Whack-a-Mole from Hades.

“Drug dealer dies in the barracks; “Violent asphyxia.” (Riva Ligure) A Tunisian suspect was being held since June 6 in a barracks, awaiting his turn in the legal process.  That’s no longer necessary, due to a “powerful pressure exerted on his thorax,” as the coroner put it.  The three Carabinieri who arrested him and had him in custody have now been arrested.

 “She tried to kill him, he applauds her.” (Castiglione delle Stiviere) That’s not quite what it sounds like, but it is somewhat thought-provoking.  Claudio del Monaco (son of the famous tenor Mario del Monaco) is married to Daniela Werner, a German former nursery-school teacher and aspiring soprano.  In December 2011 things went wrong and she tried to stab him to death.  She went to the psychiatric penitentiary and by applying herself to her singing, was able to perform a concert in public last July 2.  “I love my wife more than before and I want to forget the past,” said her husband.  Now she goes back to serve another three years. Maybe it’s neurotic, but in a strange way I find this admirable.  I suppose it’s because the “for better for worse” isn’t usually taken to this extreme, or illuminated by this bright a light.

“Few mosquitoes; layoffs at the insecticide company.”  (Trento)  Last spring was unusually cold and wet, and it went on far too long.  You’d think the resulting lack of mosquitoes would be a good thing, and for most of us, it is.  But not for the employees of the Zobele company, 70 of whom are going to be at home from September to November because sales are so slow.  It is, indeed, always something.

Venice news:

“Train Hell, few, late, and boiling.”  Riders on the national network in the Veneto — not just tourists, but loads of commuters — are once again taking the hit of the management’s inability to provide even minimal rail service.  To the many trains which have been canceled, and the super-many which are late, has been added the increasing percentage of trains in which passengers travel in torrid conditions because the air conditioning doesn’t work.  This story comes out every summer.  I mean, every summer.  Do the managers not have calendars? Or is nine months not long enough to make a plan and carry it out?  Women do it all the time.  Sorry, that just slipped out.

“Money for permits; Three policemen in handcuffs.”  Just over the lagoon in Jesolo, they discovered three of the Polizia di Stato’s finest taking cash for various special services, such as expediting applications for “permessi di soggiorno,” permits to stay in Italy for a specified length of time. What makes it worse — as if it had to be worse — is that a number of the immigrants they passed weren’t eligible for permits.  The charges: Conspiracy, corruption, counterfeiting documents, and illegal access to computer systems. What inspires the urge to smack one’s forehead isn’t that they took money, but that they took 1000 euros.  That is, about 300 euros per policeman.  I know.  If you’re going to risk blowing your career to smithereens, wouldn’t you make it just a little bit more?

I could go on, but my brain is too tired.  There will be more of these antics tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and on and on till we all disappear over the horizon.  Where they will continue, wherever we are.

A man setting out in the morning with a bag and a bouquet of hydrangeas.  It's going to be an excellent day for someone somewhere.
A man setting out in the morning with a bag and a bouquet of hydrangeas.  It looks good.
I was tempted to remove the empty detergent bottle, left out to await tomorrow recycling pickup, but realized that it's futile to try to engineer perfection. The fact that it says "Sole" (sun) gives it a special pass.
I was tempted to remove the empty detergent bottle, left out to await tomorrow’s recycling pickup, but I kind of like the fact that it says “Sole” (sun).
And while I'm on the subject of flowers, a woman waiting for the vaporetto was bearing this astonishing armload of peonies. I challenge anyone to tell me that there is anything more beautiful than this.
And while I’m on the subject of flowers, a woman waiting for the vaporetto was bearing this astonishing armload of peonies. I invite anyone to tell me that there is anything more beautiful than this.
This cat wouldn't deign to acknowledge a heat wave, but did graciously recognize the presence of a lower-order mammal nearby.
This cat wouldn’t deign to acknowledge a heat wave, but did graciously recognize the presence of a lower-order mammal nearby.
One of my all-time favorite repair jobs. What? There's something wrong with this?
One of my all-time favorite repair jobs. What? There’s something wrong with this?
Perhaps you were unaware that Venice was bombed 42 times by Austria in the First World War.  These plaques will help you remember.
Perhaps you were unaware that Venice was bombed 42 times by Austria in the First World War. These plaques will help you remember.
translation here
“Destroyed by an Austrian bomb February 27, 1918.  Reconstructed 1920.”
Sometimes our favorite late-afternoon cafe is overrun by women who are smoking, but sometimes it seems magically to turn into a sort of little kinder-haven.  Manuela, the owner, loves them all.
Sometimes our favorite late-afternoon cafe is overrun by women who smoke and babble, but sometimes it seems magically to turn into a sort of little kinder-haven. Manuela, the owner (seated), loves them all.
If there is even the tiniest supposition of a waft of air, a little swirl of breeze will always form right exactly there.
If there is any breeze at all in Venice, a little swirl of air will always form right exactly there and make a scuffed-up patch of water.  It makes me smile.

 

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