Venice-Art-Tours Blog

TV? Be Gone!

No matter which country you live in, the greatest source of inanity, stupidity, immoral values, bad English, bad philosophy, wrong facts, bias, political correctness, boredom, waste of time, vulgarity, obscenity, is....TELEVISION!!

Sure, movies are dumb and dumber, pop music is ridiculous, obscene, and sexist, and newspapers can reach their own heights in the negatives above, but leave the the Big Prize to the aptly named idiot box.

If you wish to join my anti- pop culture crusade, purchase a TV-B-Gone. A key ring sized gismo that will turn off most TV sets at 25 feet at the press of a button.

See clods sitting in a bar watching a dumb football game, Nebraska versus Iowa, give me a break! Or worse: watching a sit-com. Sidle up behind them and unobtrusively flick your Bic, aka, TV-B-Gone. 10 seconds later, pop... a dark screen. And the guys keep looking for 15 seconds, then they begin to talk with each other, you know, communication! They completely forget what they were watching. TV was their narcotic. They are now free to be human. To think.

Use it at shopping centres in the TV department where, at least here in Italy, there are 300 sets all tuned to the same talk show hosted by a hot babe wearing a not so wide belt before a bleacher full of salivating extras from Grease. Flick your toy and move it along, row after row. TV-B-Gone!

I considered using it on World Cup Final night (Italy-France) last year on the TVs in Campo Santa Margherita. But I chickened out. "Elderly body found in canal, no clues...but a small, unknown gadget was found in its throat."

Here's the website for your own TV-B-Gone. Comes from the USA, my homeland, itself a great contributor to the inanity (TV) mentioned above, but at least Mitch Altman who is the inventor, is righting a massive, world scale wrong. http://www.tvbegone.com/

BRAVO MITCH!!   

      

And the Rockets' Red Glare...

Here in Venice, Sunday was the feast of the Redeemer (Redentore in Italian) and its origin is the plague of 1576 which was a horrendous event that took 50,000 lives, fully one-third of Venice's population. When it was over in 1577 Palladio designed and the city began to construct the Church of the Redeemer on Giudecca Island in thanks to God for sparing the city.

Redentore is a major annual event here in which a pontoon bridge is built across the Giudecca Canal to the Redentore Church itself (see photo) and most Venetians feel the need to cross over it, we hope, on the way to church to offer thanks. It was celebrated by 100,000 people Saturday night and with a huge midnight fireworks display in the part of the lagoon just off St Mark's Square. Thousands of boats populated with party goers crammed the lagoon: small runabouts, converted transport boats, barges, each stuffed with party-goers. The wise reveller chooses a boat with a loo. In addition, others crammed the Piazzetta San Marco and all areas along the water to see the show.

Laurie and I are not event people. We abhor crowds and noise; for instance, each year we leave Venice for the last week of Carnivale to keep our sanity. We return on Ash Wednesday when blessed silence envelopes Venice and the sanitation workers have been working since midnight removing the wretched refuse. Anyway, this Redentore, kindly, Frank O'Halloran and Liesl Odenweller (soprano) decided to do a fundraising dinner for next year's Pantomine, on their large altana/terrace that overlooks the fireworks and the Redentore Church....views extraordinary.

The pyrotechnics were truly amazing, a show which lasted about 35 minutes (maximum for normal humans). Just before it began, Frank informed us that the fireworks this year would be accompanied by music. Our hearts sank. No escape. At one time, this was the city of Vivaldi, Galuppi, Monteverdi, Albinone; half of Verdi's operas debuted here. That was then. We feared the worst. For me, in Italy the word "music" carries an unspoken modifier: Italiana. By that I mean Italian rock-pop which ubiquitously and continuously pollutes the air of shops, bars, restaurants and shopping centres here.

At 11:30 we heard the strains of the opening of "Thus Spake Zarathustra" by Richard Strauss when the first flares were ignited. It was reasonably suitable as the music and the fireworks coordinated their crescendos: a rising tide of music and explosion. Although the music was distracting,  we thought, hold on, maybe this will be tolerable. One or two more classical snippets, then, oh-oh, some movie music by Ennio Marricone and we were into spaghetti westerns, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly; then music from Grease, "You're the one that I want, ooh,ooh,ooh", followed by the predictable Bocelli duet, U2, somebody called Saline Dion, and an un-rousing Firebird (drowned out). Why didn't they, at least, play Handel's Musick for the Royal Fireworks? Too obvious,hunh?

Next year it will be Paris Hilton, you watch. We'll be in the mountains.

Addendum (36 hrs later): Gazzettino newspaper reported today that nobody liked the music, including the mayor, that music was a bad idea and it has been scratched from future programmes. Yeahhhh! God is in his Heaven!

Back Home in the Sun

We have been away for two weeks in England occasioned by Laurie doing a session at Way With Words literary festival in Devon where Laurie read from her new book to an audience of 150 fans. We spent two days in rainy Wiltshire (where Goldsmith Peter Page drove us around in his 1947 bread van), then rainy Cornwall for five days and rainy Devon for two days and finally five days in Devonshire sun. So no complaints: we were lucky.

We are both big fans of poet John Betjeman who lived and died and is buried in the Cornwall he loved, by the sea. He is buried in the churchyard of the ancient St Enodoc Church, on the slope down to the seashore, with the smells and sounds of the crashing surf.

We visited his grave, said a prayer and there we read aloud his poem Trebetherick:

We used to picnic where the thrift
Grew deep and tufted to the edge;
We saw the yellow foam flakes drift
In trembling sponges on the ledge
Below us, till the wind would lift
Them up the cliff and o’er the hedge.
Sand in the sandwiches, wasps in the tea,
Sun on our bathing dresses heavy with the wet,
Squelch of the bladder-wrack waiting for the sea,
Fleas around the tamarisk, an early cigarette.

From where the coastguard houses stood
One used to see below the hill,
The lichened branches of a wood
In summer silver cool and still;
And there the Shade of Evil could
Stretch out at us from Shilla Mill.
Thick with sloe and blackberry, uneven in the light,
Lonely round the hedge, the heavy meadow was remote,
The oldest part of Cornwall was the wood as black as night,
And the pheasant and the rabbit lay torn open at the throat.

But when a storm was at its height,
And feathery slate was black in rain,
And tamarisks were hung with light
And golden sand was brown again,
Spring tide and blizzard would unite
And sea come flooding up the lane.
Waves full of treasure then were roaring up the beach,
Ropes round our mackintoshes, waders warm and dry,
We waited for the wreckage to come swirling into reach,
Ralph, Vasey, Alistair, Biddy, John and I.

Then roller into roller curled
And thundered down the rocky bay,
And we were in a water world
Of rain and blizzard, sea and spray,
And one against the other hurled
We struggled round to Greenaway.
Blesséd be St Enodoc, blesséd be the wave,
Blesséd be the springy turf, we pray, pray to thee,
Ask for our children all happy days you gave
To Ralph, Vasey, Alistair, Biddy, John and me.

Here is Betjeman's tomb and the view from it to the sea.