Impulse

Ahh, Venice  — the city that con­tin­ues to throw me for a loop. After spend­ing 23 hours on aiplanes, then 8 hours on a train, I walked out of the train sta­tion expect­ing to see gon­do­las, accor­dions, and the sounds of opera. Instead, the first thing I see was a bunch of native Americans in full feath­ered head­dress regailia pound­ing drums and singing the ancient songs of the American plains tribes. I kid you not. If I hadn’t been exhausted, lug­ging about 40lbs in a back­pack, and out­fit­ted with two other bags, I would’ve dug out my cam­era, but I was — so you’ll just have to take my word for it.

Speaking of cam­eras, my sec­ond thought in Venice was, °WTF was I think­ing not bring­ing any of my cam­eras???” Actually, I know exactly what I was think­ing: I’ll bring my lit­tle video cam­era, thus chal­lenge myself into doc­u­ment­ing my voy­age in video instead of still pho­tog­ra­phy terms. Well, that and I didn’t want to worry about $8000 of cam­era gear. Then I saw a guy with the exact getup I left back home. Oh well, luck­ily my lit­tle video cam­era takes cute lit­tle stills (0.3 megapixel, baby!) like these.
Walking around here, it’s easy to imag­ine this place as the seat of a great marine empire. The entrances to the Grand Canale have mon­u­men­tal build­ings and all the archi­tec­ture along the canal is impres­sive, bor­row­ing all the fan­ci­est bits from west­ern and east­ern cul­tures. Boats zip all around con­stantly. From the water, the city looks like it was lit­er­ally built out of the sea. I can almost see the PR firm back in the 1500s: “The Venetian Navy: We take liv­ing at sea seri­ously.“
Once you get off the boat, every­thing becomes a maze of twisty pas­sages, all alike. This was kind of cool for a bit. Just a bit. I nor­mally have an excel­lent sense of direc­tion, but an excel­lent sense of direc­tion doesn’t help a damn bit when the roads often dead-end into canals. I also don’t feel like I have a sense of the city. Since the broad­est of streets is about 6 feet wide, and most build­ings are 4 floors high, I can’t really see the city. I’m a lit­tle rat in a maze that occa­sion­ally pops out into a big open place and can see the sun.
The Peggy Gugenheim col­lec­tion was cool. Like most mod­ern art museuems, about half of it went straight over my head. The other half was pretty cool. It really gave me an under­stand­ing of how an art col­lec­tor can make a per­sonal artis­tic state­ment, just as an artist does, by the works they choose. Collecting (like edit­ing) is itself an art.
And because I took it, here’s another pic­ture. Yeah, I know it’s very, very “post­card”. Deal.

Related posts:

1. Venezia Due