The Venice Guggenheim

I wonder about Peggy Guggenheim living in her Venice house which to me smacks of a mausoleum with cold marble floors and concrete walls built in the most severe right angles to one another.  But the gardens – oh, the gardens!  The rear is something out of a Zen monastery exuding peace and calm.  But it’s the front that excites; looking out onto the Grand Canal with nothing to block the way except an amazing statue of a naked man on a wild horse, arms outstretched in flight, his gigantic penis, hard and erect, thrust straight out like a throbbing finger of virility and freedom.  How something of metal or stone could project such life, such electric vitality, is a wonder in itself.  It’s neither erotic nor sexual in the lurid sense; rather it’s a testament to youth and the fiery energy of life in all its orgiastic glory.  Even so, a father abashed at passing this work of art with his young daughter ordered her to avert her eyes and to walk on.

Venice is an Eel

30 April 2010

On a map it was pointed out to me that Venice is like a fish; actually it’s more like a pudgy eel.  The city has banned straight lines and has made them all into intricate squiggles.  It is a place without cars – where would they go?  Even bicycles are rare as you couldn’t ride them over the myriad of step bridges.  So people walk.  And when the labyrinth you are walking down hits an impasse – as it often does – you simply turn around and connect to another part of the maze of narrow streets, alleys, passages, tunnels and then – low and behold – a magnificent square, a campo, opens up like a giant field of cobblestone, bright and airy as the passageway is dark. You don’t know where you are, but it doesn’t matter anymore.  Everywhere is home.

Water defines this place like nowhere else in the world – at least nowhere I know.  The tapestry of canals is the city’s circulatory system – part of an urban biology that is unique and surprisingly liveable.  Everything that is done elsewhere by gas guzzling trucks and cars is done here by boat and barge – quicker, easier, safer, cleaner.

At first I wondered about the elderly and the disabled.  How do they ever manage such a complex obstacle course?  Surprisingly Venice has a higher percentage of elderly and retired than most Italian cities – the average age here is well into the forties.  So how do the elderly get around?  They seem to manage.  I’ve seen people on crutches negotiate the steepest bridge, step by step.  They do it slowly without complaint.  When I was lugging my heavy bag over yet another barrier, climbing narrow stairways that led over one canal after another and muttering to myself how life must be an endurance test every day for people who live here, I noticed a man older than myself taking a barrow of building supplies that must have weighed twice as much as my suitcase over the same bridge with an ease and agility I could only admire.  Perhaps people live longer here because they have managed to make their entire city into an urban fitness trail where they work out daily till they die.  And it’s rare, I’m told, for children to ever fall into the canal.  Only tourists do that. Then they’re quickly fished out since the canals are alive all hours of the day and night.  

The Night Train from Budapest to Venice

27 April 2010

What I'd forgotten to take into account when booking a night train from Budapest to Venice is that it goes through Croatia which isn't in the EU - so around midnight there was pounding at my cabin door by a border guard demanding to see my passport. She was a young woman, sleek and trim, with carefully varnished nails.  I noticed her nails because she was clutching my passport, holding it inches from my face so all I could see was the red of Great Britain and her painted fingers.  She was pleasant enough but for some reason she decided to give my document a thorough inspection and took it away with her.  I didn't see her or it for about ten minutes and by that time I was starting to wonder whether an old passport of mine that had been stolen some years ago hadn't fallen into the hands of drug dealers, people smugglers or (heaven forbid) the Israeli Secret Service.  After a half hour delay she finally gave it back.  But by that time I was already planning what to do if they held me for questioning after the train took off (not that I came to any sensible conclusion).  Thankful to be on my way again, I tried to go to sleep only to be woken once again at the other side of Croatia for exit checks and then at Slovenia for passport checks again.  By the time we reached Venice around 7 the next morning, I was exhausted.

The Universal City

27 April 2010  

I’m travelling through Europe at what clearly is a turning point.  The dreams of mutual prosperity that linked and empowered such diverse peoples and economies are quickly fading.  In Greece, where I will soon be, the economic masters of world finance are forcing ordinary working people to pay for the greed and corruption of the wealthy few.  There will be hell to pay for this.

In Budapest the streets are not filled with tourists with thick wallets anymore.  Like many cities of the east, its feet are mired in different camps – one in the command economy of the past; the other in the service economy of the supposed future.  Budapest itself has become a theme park trading on its history.  Everything is geared to pry out the little money that comes in with the dwindling crowds of holiday-makers.  So they sell whatever they have – memories of the Romans, the Turks, the Austrians and memories of the holocaust.  There are dens for sex and dens for gambling.   The city has become a service centre for fantasy and desire.  When you’re competing for the dwindling cash of the jaded tourist who has seen it all, you have to give it everything you’ve got.  But what does that mean for the people who live here?  As the money shrinks and belts are tightened, will they all have to compete to be cleaners, touts and whores?  Is that the fate of Eastern Europe?  No wonder the far right has once more emerged as the protector of the ordinary man and woman.  With so many promises betrayed, people revert to the wooden cross and the iron sword.

I don’t mean this to be taken in the wrong way, but there’s much about Budapest of 1970 that I enjoyed more than the contemporary version.  Back then it might have had a dour side but the city hadn’t been sold down the river in the way it has today.  It had integrity in so far as the State allowed. Budapest itself had a sense of community and its inhabitants shared something that made them unique.  Visiting the city was not like visiting Paris or Rome or London (though Paris or Rome or London were different then as well) since the Universal City hadn’t been invented yet.  Also the streets weren’t filled with beggars and unemployed kids trying to earn a bit of money by hustling tourists. Certainly tourists were hustled back then in different ways, but it’s the extent.  Today’s touts are young kids who have no other way of earning a living.  They don’t want to be hustling tourists.  In Cambridge college kids hustle tourists but they do it because they think they can make more money than doing something else – and maybe it’s considered cool.  In Budapest they have no choice.  They either hustle tourists or nothing.  There’s a big difference between having to do something and wanting to do it. 

The great malls and esplanades that have sprung up selling everything you can buy in whatever Universal City you go, exude the fragrance of truffled exploitation.  But that’s where the money is while the rest of Budapest is sucked dry.  Consider the Jewish quarter where communities are being rent asunder by big money buying up the aging tenements, remodelling, refurbishing and then selling them on.  Ironically (maybe not so ironically) a lot of this capital is coming from Israel.  So rich Jews, in a strange way, are responsible for pushing out the poor Jews from communities they had been brutally pushed out of not so many years before.  Still the old community exists and, to compound the irony, it might yet be saved by the recession (if that’s the proper word for financial Armageddon).