La Dolce Vita

Blaue Briese - Blue Breeze 28,5 x 38,5 cm

THE SWEET LIFE

Being in Italy is a sensuous project

requiring intelligence and good taste.

Failing those qualities, money, or at

least a facsimile thereof, helps a lot.

In these parts appetite is a feeling,

a deep emotion fraught with musical content. 

Thus lunch today is a concerto for rose-tinted

thinly sliced veal in a shallow pool of olive oil

accented with anarchic squirts of lemon. But first

an overture because after two glasses of vino rosso

della casa lunch has become operatic: ravioli delicately

packed with minced whatever, cooked in butter,

draped with fragile flakes of sage. Dolce and coffee 

follow. A nearly depleted credit card

struggles to pay for all of this.

Not a drop of free grappa, however, despite   

a shitload of bravos and bravas dispensed

by two sincerely satisfied customers. Nonetheless,

we lurch happily into sunlight, the heroic streets

belonging to us. But this a lie. My “roots” are on

the other side of water, digging ever deeper in sub-soil

I don’t know anymore, slippery, metamorphic,

vaguely fraudulent. Memory seems like another

word for self-deception. Or as Wyndam Lewis more

or less put it: “Roots? What are we, bushes and

trees…or men?” On the other hand, that asshole

of a genius did praise Hitler. Still, I don’t feel like 

a vegetable or fruit, or even a tall noble

redwood on some wind-warped bluff

lording over the Pacific. I am a

sated animal who laughably assumes 

he’s sui generis, roughly, pulling his load 

of fear and guilt and perfunctory self-loathing

but on his way to admire how Andrea Del Sarto

painted hands, and Raphael, the sweetness of mother and child.    

Corelli - Concerto grosso opus 6 No. 8

Trevor Pinnock and the English Concert