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| 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
