Hablas Espanol?

Tube Stops: Termini, Aeroport, El Prat de Llobregat, Espanya, Liceu, Jaume 1, Lesseps

Everyone needs a holiday, right? None more so than the Romans...again the city is empty and everyone has left town to go to their apartments by the sea. For every piece of rented or bought property in Rome, there seems to be an accompanying sea-side pied-a-terre for most Italians living in Rome.

Every year, me and my friends have tried to have a holiday away together somewhere but for the last few years, the people's choice has been Sitges, located along the coast of Spain near Barcelona. Having booked our holiday in January, I decided to head to Barcelona first, a place we visited albeit briefly on our last sojourn to Sitges.

I had arranged to stay first at an artist's studio-cum-bedsit for the weekend, via the website airbnb.com, which fell through as it was already booked. Next, one day before leaving, I booked a bed at a couple's apartment near the centre of Barcelona, only to have them try to rip me off by raising the price and asking for money 'offline'. Great. So I arrived on Saturday and hostel-hopped, eventually ending up in a cupboard above a tourist shop: just me, a 2 x 4 floor space, a bed and a fan. Occasionally-agraphobic me was happy :)


My friend Claudio & his friend Alessandro were also in town on their hols so we agreed to meet at the Espanya tube stop and check out the Eixample district. As night fell, Barcelona became surreal - tourist attractions seemed otherwordly, long vistas carried us past abstract monuments and towards the concrete grid system of Eixample. A long promenade lead to a massive fountain whose gigantic jets of water were illuminated with a rainbow of colours as they were fired into the air in time to various classic 70's disco tunes and 80's power ballads: spectacle meets child-like fun. My attention was absolutely captivated but in contrast, Eixample itself was empty, long stretches of anonymous buildings - or rather we were early, venturing out to find a meal at 22:00.



Views of Barcelona



By the end of the night, we had dined in a chic restaurant with only one or two other people, an atmosphere that whilst being stylish and chic, was monochromatic and a little cold: where was everyone? Was this the ghost-town that Rome becomes in the Summer? The masses were just waiting however, to crowd the streets in barely-there gym-wear, whilst the bars and clubs, hidden behind simply-detailed facades stretched and yawned and opened their doors. We chatted to an Amy Winehouse drag-queen about living in Rome and pushed our way through a sea of meat at 'Bim Bam Bum' (!!), long stretches of walking gym advertisements. Interestingly, I experienced homophobia earlier in the day when two guys shouted "Maria Maria!" at a gay couple holding hands. It wasn't until the two guys walked past the couple that they saw how enormous they were and promptly stopped. I smiled.

(original photo by Claudio)

A.R.T

I have a confession to make. I have never been able to stop thinking about art since I was at school. I won the art prize at school three years running and there is something in my blood that churns and gurgles whenever my hands get itchy and I see art materials hanging lifelessly in a shop window. It's like being addicted to substance that you don't need to injest but that constantly reinvigorates and nourishes you. Get me, with the profoundity there. Recent attempts to perform cartharses on a regular basis include:

1) Setting up an Istagram account
2) Experimenting with pencil and ink, analysing portraiture again (see left)
3) Visiting Barcelona

I had the very good fortune to become friends with Daniel Meakin in Barcelona, a resident artist of some ten years whose bright murals and crushingly colourful depictions of towns and city-scapes have been sold in countries all over the world. This for me was someone who 'has made it', living the dream and profiting from it. We had coffee in the Cafe del'Opera, musing about the world, followed by a tour of Barcelonetto and beers by the harbour, and all the while my head was filled with thoughts of my second cousin's gallery and how everything seemed to make sense and abstract wishes and dreams started to combine together, previously raw ingredients taking a possible shape. Galleries which host your artwork at 0% commission? No need for art qualifications or academic background? All easily swallowed with the last of my Estrella!

Some of Daniel's work (which I hope he doesn't mind me reposting!)



The evening finished with a reunion with Cas, a teacher from the school where I work in Rome who has since gone back to her native land of Barcelona. She recommended a tapas bar near the narrow streets of the Jaume tube stop, where we had amazing tapas, ripping off the heads of massive prawns, eating the greasiest but the most amazing chorizo and of course, quaffing large glasses of sangria. With Claudio and Alessandro, plus Cas' friend Julia, we had lots to catch up on, and the conversation soon turned into a U.N. conference with all the different languages being spoken!

(From left to right: yours truly, Claudio, Cas,
Natalie Portman Julia, Alessandro)

From tapas, to more drinks around La Ramblas and finally a student-esque bar, where me, Cas and Julia talked love, loss and life in general, whilst I looked around at the projector screen showing rock concerts live, the oil drum seats and hundreds of beer labels stuck to one wall and remembered London: the haphazard and the 'don't give a shit' decor. The waitress didn't serve us for what seemed like half an hour - a rockabilly attitude which made me love/hate the place even more, no pretensions. More of Julia's English accent and a double-take we were all doing, thinking that Natalie Portman Julia must have come from money, such was the silver-spoon English she had learnt at a school in the UK. It's always impressive to me when our European counterparts can speak other languages fluently: the general English populace must seem lazy by comparison! Even Cas' English had improved greatly since our days of inventing our own Esperanto mix of Italian, Spanish and English in the teacher's common-room in Rome.

Outside Moog, a club where a top floor is entirely
dedicated to dancing to 80's & 90's pop, surrounded by mirrors
under pink light. In other words, disco heaven.

Down a back-street, we passed 'Moog', a club that to all appearances appeared to be a hide-out for rock stars who have fallen from some level of grace, for tourist booze-hounds and the like. In reality, the vision of a big, curly-haired DJ, trapped behind a cage of bars, rocking out to Bananarama was more than brilliant and we danced as if no-one was watching (despite watching ourselves reflected a thousand times in the mirrors). My family nickname is 'Moog' and it seems that again, fate was telling me something in us going to what has to be one of the best clubs I've ever been too. Kudos to Cas!

The weekend was over in one heavy heartbeat and soon I was on my way to the airport to meet the others and head to Sitges...

Anecdote

I heard this through a friend of a friend: (imagine 'Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona' voice-over)

A woman is talking to her Italian confidentes over brunch, in a pleasant apartment outside of Rome, filled with unusual paintings, the smell of coffee and a large number of cats.

She is bemoaning the fact that she has become recently divorced and is fairly certain that she is 'over' men and will not find another guy to share her life with. The friends cajole her about this, claiming that of course she will meet someone.

As the cats start to climb all over the woman as she tells her story, the friends ask her if she minds this somewhat unexpected attention. Is she a dog or a cat person, they ask. Either way, they suggest, she might want one or two of either animal as companions in the future.

She replies that she is more of a dog person but that, all she really sees herself with in the future, is an apartment filled with birds and fish.

The women laugh hysterically.

.....

NB: In Italian, there are many, many, many common words which are a euphemism for reproductive organs and various secretions produced during sex. Here are a selection:

1) Uccello = "bird" or "penis"
2) Pesce = "fish" or "penis"
3) Tubelo = "potato" or "vagina"
4) Pane = "bread" or "vagina"
5) Borra = "butter" or ... I think you get the (word) picture.

Proud to be...Italian?

Tube stops: a meandering vista past Via Giovanni Giolitti, Via Cavour, Piazza dell’Esquilino, Largo Visconti Venosta, Largo Corrado Ricci, Via dei Fori Imperiali, Piazza del Colosseo, Via Celio Vibenna, Via di San Gregorio, Piazza di Porta Capena e Via del Circo Massimo.

This year was a very big year for Italian politics.

(sorry, I was tempted to use politics with a big 'P', to illustrate the magnitude by which Governmental/Parliamentary/constitutional politics in Italy has pervaded every aspect of normal everyday actions and intentions or 'politics' with a small 'p'. What with all the peeing, I'll have to keep going to lav every 5 mins, and I'm definitely not drinking enough water this Summer to afford to do that. Error.)

I'd heard about the phenomenon that is Berlusconi. Or 'He who must not be named' (in articles or reports that his media companies will just refuse to print anyway.) His comparison to Voldemort is considerably apt because in lessons, we tend to steer clear of politics or religion as topics to break the unbearable silence created, when at 6:55pm, a student has categorically refused to accept that there is no rule for when we should use the gerund of the infinitive in English. (incidentally, it has something to do with intrasitive verbs but future teachers be warned, this attempted explanation does not satisfy personalities that crave order and logic in their universe.) So Berlusconi is rarely mentioned, except in trusted company, i.e., students who aren't afraid to reveal political allegiances. Loudly.

(Silvio himself, above)
Mumble, mumble, something about knowing a person
by the company they keep, mumble, mumble

So aside from the Roman orgyesque 'Bunga Bunga' parties, which initially sounded to me like 'Jenga Jenga' parties, where sharp-suited politicians are publicly ridiculed for failing to build the highest tower of Jenga blocks and so lose their positions (party games meets Darwinism), why are a large percentage of the Italian people waiting for Berlusconi to just...die?

Despite controlling the majority of the country's media - to the extent that demonstrations against his winning a vote of 'no confidence' in the country's recent apprisal of his scandalous affair with Ruby the prostitute (et al) just never appeared in the press or on tv - Berlusconi helped usher in an era of the Italian "macho-man". (You can almost imagine a Bunga Bunga party in full swing, to the tune of 'So Macho', in which Berlusconi decides that every Italian ragazzo should aspire to being 'big' and 'strong' with 'big blue eyes'. Except that most of them are, well, not that.

And so to gay rights, which have become irreparably damaged by a growing culture of machoistic power-suiting and money-hoarding, where those that control the Government and the media saturate it with images of botoxed women, big-lipped women, women wearing not a lot but somehow still smiling through big-lips and botox, and the occasional advert for a gay helpline that appeared for about two months and has not been seen since. If women look beautiful, men might just sleep with them (see recent comments made about Italy having the lowest birth-rate in the EU...) If you are gay, old, young, or not pretty, you might as well have money as a form of social empowerment.

A recent Parliamentary resolution was turned down that would have, in a subtle yet significant way, created that little bit more freedom in society for gay people to exist in: any action or incident deemed anti-gay would have become prosecutable to the appropriate extent of the law. Insert plausible rationale for turning down this most basic of civil rights.

Monica Bellucci: a good example of how best to
turn attention away from a less than credible acting
career and towards what the pundits really
want to touch, stroke, feel, "respect" (ahem)!

Berlusconi's riposte to the overwhelming evidence of his soliciting the then underage "Ruby" for a night of wild depravity (and one would guess viagra - Silvio is 75 years old): "At least I'm not gay." Because being born a homosexual obviously rates at an all-time zero, whilst being adulterous in the public eye and ensuring your country becomes the laughing stock of Europe, nay the world, is somehow excusable as power-player hijinks. Where are my taxes going again?

So whilst there is an assumption that the men of Italy might not be "real" men (i.e., having copious amounts of extra-marital sex with prostitutes) and might be effeminate/gay and therefore less than 'real' men, they are somehow expected to prove their masculinity by bagging a botox beauty, raising a family when the Government no longer financially supports you with the money to buy a house, money to start a family and to support them yourself. Suddenly staying at home and being a bamboccioni sounds like your only credible, post-recession option.


Going GaGa

11th of June. I've been to many London Pride marches and one Europride event held in the capital myself but nothing prepared me for Rome's first ever Europride event: as the temperature started to soar and expectations were running high, a number of events held at Piazza Vittorio Emmanuelle were held, opening up the public's consciousness about LGBT culture. Which seemed daunting. How much exposure of the celebrating, diverse rainbow of LGBT people would this land of the Vatican be able to tolerate? I pictured bemused priests mingling with drag-nuns, labourers with lady-boys, top-less muscle Marys and ... well, the virgin Mary (again in drag.) Liberation. Fingers up at repressive tradition.

The reality? Better.

My friend TQ had come over to visit and together we met up with our American friends and ventured over to piazza dei cinquecento, which was packed with what looked like demonstrators, the torch-wielding villages but actually turned out to be citizens taking this as their opportunity to support 'the cause' whilst simultaneously defying Italy's dogmatic authoritarianism: the Vatican, the politicians, even the Carabinieri! The street quickly filled and with a reduced police presence, the crowd took formation and started to meander down Via Cavour to the chirping accompaniment of whistles and whoops. No riding on a float above the crowd or standing at the side, watching the colourful brigade of organisations pass by, everyone was together, marching down the street, dancing and celebrating freely. How very Communist.



Various people were recognised amidst the thong (or should I say thong) - hard to spot past the thrusting, gold g-string crotch of some Ancient Egyptian dressed go-go boy, making its way through the masses, a parade of Abercrombie and Fitch models, let loose for the weekend from their plastic factory. We made firm friends with one of the many barrow-boys wheeling through the madness, flogging dodgy German beer and then spraying all of us with water to keep us cool, and when we later stood in the shade of a bar to catch our breath, the surging, non-stop crowds continuing down the street meant our break was short-lived: there was dancing to be had.



We danced behind a float that wound its way in the blistering midday sun towards Circo Massimo, stopping briefly outside the Colosseo as part of a snake-like chain of party wagons. Taking the opportunity, we danced in the street and drew a crowd of Venezuelen transexuals and ravers and a friend of Date's that lived in the area, the actress from Il Pesciolino: it was her turn to see my "performance", instead of Date's which she's had the good fortune to share a stage with each time the two get together to perform the play almost every year. A thespian's thumbs up.

And finally, Circo Massimo at dusk. The stage was set and the crowd seemed to be several hundred thousand strong. We stumbled past people of all description, eyes sagging under the day's events, skin browned from the heat of the day. The atmosphere was still and then, pushing ourselves up against the bodies in front of us, we heard Lady Gaga give a speech about governments around the world that do not yet fully support gay rights. Italy was not mentioned.

Apparently, it later turned out that she didn't have permission to mention Italy as one of these governments - a condition of her appearing at Europride. And so, Gaga has become an almost empty symbol of gay rights in our modern context: money controls even the ability to express the (somewhat controversial) idea that every person on this planet has rights and that those that actively repress those rights should be named and shamed.

Date mentioned that he would have preferred to see gay families camped out in front of the Vatican, sharing a picnic, as symbol of acceptance and forward-thinking: anything but what happened earlier in the day when a gay porn star was invited on stage at Circo Massimo and showed off his arsehole to the assembled masses.

However we all choose to get the basic message of pride and a fight for equal rights across - via celebrities, sex stars or families - there has never been a more important time to push on and remind the world that whilst we've all come so far, there still remains much to be done and that money cannot take away our collective voice.