Veniceblog

The Venetian Line

Catherine, in Venice at the moment, wrote me that she had seen an article in a local paper in the last week about a special vaporetto service that only picked up Venetians. She didn't get it all (the Italian, I presume), and asked me to post about it.

I checked Il Gazzettino for the month and searched the words vaporetto and vaporetti, and found nothing about the issue. Maybe she saw it in La Nuova Venezia.  I know that Venetians hate the overcrowding on the Canal Grande, so it might be tempting -- in fact, I mentioned this to my wife yesterday, believe it or not.

But running two vap services would be extremely expensive/inefficient. There are so few Venetians. To add a second line for them would be crazy, not to mention the worsening of the crowding of the waterways and the extra moto ondoso, already at a crisis stage.

Has anyone heard/read anything about this?

Il Cornetto Marmellata all'Albicocca

For me, one of life's enduring mysteries mysteries is why it is not possible to obtain a croissaint in all of Venice without it being shot full of apricot jam. Not orange, peach, raspberry. Not 80% or 95% of the time. Always apricot jam, everywhere. Or so it seems.

I'm flummoxed by the cornetto marmellata all'albicocca. It seems so random. Why apricot? Or for that matter why anything? Venice has such a brilliant tradition of pastry making. Yet here, instead, we have these undersized, generally sub-fresh jelly vessels where a warm, flakey, buttery crescent is supposed to be. Why should proper croissaint technology elude them? What do the French do for breakfast when they come to Venise? Quelle horreur!

Mambo!

Silvana Mangano plays a lovely Venetian shopgirl whose life is inalterably re-choreographed by a bad-boy dancer, in the 1954 feature-film, Mambo, directed by Roberto Rosen and produced by Dino De Laurentiis.

You can download the public domain film free and legally here. Free is good. Hi-res and everything.

And while we're on the topic, what's your favorite film featuring Venice? Leave me a comment or email me.

Personally, I'm not sure that a truly killer Venice-set movie has been made yet. I always seem to find myself looking more at the city than the actors, which is not a good sign. Topping my list would be The Comfort of Strangers,  I think, or possibly Senso. What do you think?

Fodor's: Take Note

Wired News has a story today about a group of artists and technologists that have cobbled together a “location aware” PDA-based tour of one of the less-traveled sestieri of Venice, Castello. Check it out. The system, still in an experimental stage, uses Bluetooth technology to inform the PDA of local attractions/points of interest, triggering pre-loaded content on the device. Judging from the accounts of the system, it sounds like this is really only a “proof of concept”, but it still makes me smile.

A couple interesting things about this.

The first has nothing to do with technology. One of the project’s missions was to pioneer ways to use information to romance Castello, and hopefully, draw tourists out of the main sightseeing areas and into less-frequented parts of the city. It’s a kind of touristic load-balancing that Venice desperately needs.

The other thing that stokes me is the prospect of using location-aware devices and object-recognition technology to allow destinations – like Venice – to tell their stories to travelers. It pierces the veil of ignorance that keeps a visitor from understanding the context, history and deeper meaning of where they stand.

There are numerous emerging technologies that will, without any doubt, transform the concept of “guidebook” in radical ways. Here, for instance, is a kooky looking “heads-up display” system that was experimentally deployed in Austria by researchers. It's built around “smart glasses” which interactively annotate your environment and tell you what you’re looking at. Warning: you’ll have to peer past the (formidable) ergonomic and aesthetic problems prototypes like these have and take it on faith that, eventually, you won’t need to walk around Piazza San Marco looking like The Terminator or a mutant grasshopper.

Electric Giudeccaland

Other than the city itself, one of the most wonderful things about the year-and-a-half I lived in Venice without a 9-to-5 job was the time I had to explore personal passions. Precious time without a clock roaring in my ears. I’m blessed or cursed, depending on your perspective, with many abnormally compelling interests. One is music. I play a bunch of instruments, and dragged a half-ton of gear with me to Venice including some guitars, a long, heavy digital piano, some amps, mics, and a few book boxes of cables, jacks, clips and God knows what else.

For the first time in a long time, I was really able to improve my chops, digging into old blues and barrelhouse piano bits and Hendrix guitar licks I was never able to crack before.

I also cranked out a few “mash-ups” … sliced-up snips of songs that, when smooshed together, become completely different, unique songs in their own right. It’s a kind of audio collaging that I first learned by watching my chum, the celebrated old-school hip-hop remixer, Steinski.

These days, there are amazing audio programs like Ableton’s Live  that let you slice and dice like a nuclear Veg-o-matic. But this was 1998, and I was then driving a shiny Mac Powerbook 3400 at a blistering 240mhz with a long-discontinued program called Soundedit 16. My cell phone – no joke – has a faster processor and runs more complex software.

Anyway, for your downloading pleasure, here’s a mash-up called All In My Toes that I created in the state-of-the-art Electric Giudeccaland studios (seen below) in Venice (my living room). It combines The Doors tune “Maggie M’Gill” with an a cappella song called “Go Down Old Hannah” by American bluesmaster, Leadbelly  (Huddie Ledbetter). There's an interesting and highly-compatible collision between The Doors in LA circa 1970 and the then-inmate Leadbelly recorded in 1933 at Angola State Prison in Louisiana. I blow some blues harp on the recording to create a little bridge, but otherwise, it’s the Doors and Huddie, duking it out. (Right click on the link, and "save as" to download to your PC. It's about 3 MB.)

The control room at Electric Giudeccaland

Interesting coda: through a connection at National Public Radio, this recording found its way to The Doors keyboardist, Ray Manzarak, who surprised me with a phone call and some very nice words. Ray baby … I’m ready when you are.

Master Thieves at Work

In the last half century, the wells (or pozzi, as they're known)  that grace the campi of the Venice have been sealed over with concrete and then, typically, crowned with a ultra-heavy cast-iron lid.

So last week, police were understandably puzzled as to how and why someone pried off the massive cap off of a pozzo in the Campiello dei Calegheri, near the Fenice, and disappeared into the night with it. It had no artistic, historic or economic value. And it's not exactly like you could roll it unnoticed down the calle (and over bridges) like a hula hoop.

Mark Your Calendars

If you happen to be in Venice on November 10th, be sure to make your way to the cemetery island of San Michele where they will be unveling a lovely new furnace in the crematorium. According to the Gazzettino, "associates, friends and supporters" of the cemetery will all be in attendance.

No word on refreshments, however, so bring a flask to be safe.