Tourists take a load off
Sometimes people ask me when the “tourist season” or “high season” begins, and I used to be uncertain. Uncertain no more: It’s Easter. Easter is like the starting bell at Churchill Downs — they just start coming. I can’t explain it, but it has never failed; even if Easter were to fall on February 3, November 5, January 22 — that would be the start of tourist season. But that’s not what’s weighing on me.
What’s weighing on me is how so many of our honored guests have come to behave as if they were in their own backyard, or garage, or abandoned lot behind a shuttered White Tower Hamburgers. Extreme bad manners, of which we’ve already had a few starter episodes, get into the newspaper. For example, the drunken Swiss boys cavorting naked in Campo San Giacometto at the Rialto — profoundly repulsive but not DANGEROUS — or the drunken boys (unspecified nationality) who jumped off the Rialto Bridge one night — HUGELY dangerous.
Or the perhaps not even drunken young men who still were jumping off the bridge by the Danieli hotel in full daylight, blithely unconcerned about barges and taxis and gondolas below. The jumpers could easily be injured when hitting the water or, more precisely, hitting something that’s on the water (recall the drunken New Zealander a few hot summer night years ago who jumped off the Rialto and landed on a passing taxi; after six months of agony, he finally died). Anyone in a boat passing under a bridge has to start thinking they’re in some shooting gallery where, instead of bullets, there are bodies coming for them. The prospect of six months of inescapable and increasingly repellent tomfoolery makes me feel tired and dejected.
We know about these shenanigans because people make videos on their phones and post them on social media. That’s the bass line in this chaotic cantata — showing the imbecility by doing something equally imbecilic. Everyone who reads these reports wonders why people are making videos instead of calling the Carabinieri. If you know the answer to this, please step up to accept your award. Right after you call the Carabinieri. But witnesses to the Danieli escapade say that the police were indeed called, and the police indeed did not appear. So there’s that.
In any case, one doesn’t need dramatic episodes to feel repulsed by tourists, and the daily deterioration doesn’t merit much of a story in the paper. Any neighborhood is bound to offer all sorts of examples of boorish behavior. Among various options, my current obsession is the evidently irresistible urge so many people have to just sit anywhere, plop down on the pavement or bridge, when the mood strikes. I realize this is not unique to Venice, because I’ve seen young people sitting on the floor in the airport, as if there were no seats anywhere. I’m not saying we should bring back the corset and the high starched collar, but the other extreme is worse. Why? For one thing, because they’re in the way and public space is already measured in microns. Second, because it makes otherwise normal people, who almost certainly have had some upbringing, appear to want to revert to life as Homo habilis once they get to Venice.
So much for the subject of quality (lack of). In my next post, some observations on quantity (surplus of). There will be interesting statistics.
“May” in Venetian is pronounced “Biennale”
One feels the imminence of the opening of the annual contemporary art exhibition in the way one feels the approach of a heavily-laden barge on a body of still water. (Hint: A barely perceptible surge of energy which produces only the faintest wave, but you know it’s caused by something very big.)
For the past 10-14 days the impact zone delimited by via Garibaldi/Giardini/Arsenale has experienced similar increasing energy manifested by more people outside drinking at bars, more people dragging suitcases to hotels and apartments, MANY more people clogging the supermarket aisles, almost all of whom don’t look much like the locals. They are more uptown, more trendy (hair, clothes, makeup, accessories — the full catastrophe, as Zorba said about something else). They walk around looking at each other and at themselves — I don’t know, I can just tell that they’re looking at themselves. The Venetians seem to be invisible to them as they occupy a stage on which the curtain is about to rise. It’s an interesting sensation to be in the same place as someone else and yet not be in the same place at all.
None of these musings is intended to be pejorative. I’m just attempting to convey the altered atmosphere, the shifting of the rpm’s in the old zeitgeist. And why would there not be such alterations? The Biennale (founded in 1895) now runs for seven months of the year, and is worth 30 million euros. The article I read cited that number but didn’t clarify how it breaks down, but as I look around, I’m guessing that at least 28 million euros are spent on vaporetto tickets and taxis. And drinks and ice cream cones. The joint is definitely jumping.
120 artists from 51 countries are featured, including plucky little Kiribati, out in the Pacific Ocean, where each new day officially begins. There are 85 “national participations,” according to the press release, strewn about the city from the national pavilions at the Giardini to 260 other spaces wherever they might be claimed, from non-practicing churches to literal holes in the wall. There are 23 “collateral events,” 5,000 journalists, and a healthy number of luxury yachts ranging from big to astonishingly ginormous. So far, so normal.
What follows are some glimpses from the past few days, bits that show what the arrival of the Biennale looks like. This is not an encyclopedia because life is short and my interest in the subject likewise. I was impelled to put this together merely to give a resident’s-eye view of the proceedings. There will certainly be more jinks of various heights in the next few days (Opening Day is officially Saturday, May 13), but I won’t be trying to keep up with them. I’m covering this entirely by whim. It’s my new operating system.
The end of art
Does everyone remember the gondola loaded with cut-up gondolas that was parked in our canal in the opening fervor of the Biennale?
The opening of the Biennale is, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned, more like starling-swarming or the wildebeest migration than anything else. Dramatic for a short sharp moment, then it’s over and people forget about it.
By now the process is complete. The swarms began to depart the evening of June 2, and although fluttering shreds of tourists remain, the sort who seem to have come actually to look at the art and not each other (shocking, I know), life on the whole is back to its incomprehensible normality.
As everyone knows, the gondola assemblage was art. A week has passed, and this creation has been demoted to Private First Class, downgraded to Economy, put back a grade, however you want to put it.
Having fulfilled its purpose — whatever it was — the object has been removed from its watery pedestal, and taken far away. Not so far in geographic terms, but extremely far in terms of appreciation. You may have heard of “value added”? This is an example of “value subtracted.”
It is now resting quietly in the devastated territory of our rowing club. Evidently the squero here nearby that confected it didn’t want it back soon (or ever); anyway, I was told that in exchange for painting one of our boats, we agreed to let them stash it here.
Sic transit.
Boating Biennale
No, this reference isn’t to me or to my (or anybody else’s) oarage, or steerage, or careenage. I am referring to a modest work of Biennale art that I happen to LOVE — just in case anyone thought that I was against everything that had the slightest connection with this event. This little creation makes me smile.
