American Fez

Vampire State Building

As usual, should you require a colorful and comprehensive summary of the year's top news stories, then any local Hallowe'en party will undoubtedly supply your best source for such a retrospective, since every recent world cataclysm, international tyrant, celebrity death and social scandal is sure to be represented. It will be a sort of animated omnibus of global reportage from 2009. For instance, you might encounter a fellow reveler wearing deathly make-up and a droopy mustache beneath a glittering turban, consequently learning that the stage magician Ali Bongo is now the late stage magician Ali Bongo. Or perhaps you might witness someone else conceptually costumed as a devalued dollar, and immediately recall the economic downturn everyone just endured. And even those uncreative, old-fashioned party-poopers who turn-up dressed in Walmart Dracula capes and plastic fangs will either remind you that Christopher Lee became a knight of the realm in June, or that vampires are this year's media sensation. Nosferatu would be rolling in grave if he hadn't shipped the casket to Whitby.

Foreign Food

"Eat where the locals eat," travelers are usually advised when seeking restaurant suggestions in foreign cities. But in my experience the locals generally tend to eat at home, and so, unless you invade their dining rooms without invitation, accidentally dropping your passport in the zuppe bowl and knocking over Papa's grappa with your camera bag, it's highly unlikely that you will experience any such native gastronomic pleasures.

"Never order from the Tourist Menu," you are also lectured. "Avoid eateries that line the main drags and famous squares. And don't sit down at an establishment with mug-shots of pizza and spaghetti Bolognese taped to its facade." But of course, being on vacation, the main drags and famous squares are exactly where you want to be. You can call me the Philistine of Food, but I would much prefer to chew on leathery, shriveled scallops beside the Grand Canal than salivate over exquisitely-cooked squid in some "quaint" poky backstreet ristorante. Let's face it, you can waste half your holiday lost in unlit alleyways searching for that "authentic" taverna that the guidebook recommended.

One saltimbocca in Rome is as good as another to me, ditto goulash in Budapest, herring in Amsterdam, London's steak 'n' kidney pies, and whatever that oily Athenian fish is called. I am more than happy to pay six-Euros just to sit down at Caffe Florian to enjoy an equally extortionately-priced cheese panini in Saint Mark's Square. Otherwise I just bring a packed lunch: some salad, boiled egg, bit of chocolate, and arrange a picnic in the park. That’s the best kind of local eating.

Lexiconical Laconicisms

Perhaps the most important task you can perform in your own life is amassing a vocabulary that best describes your own life to yourself. How can you understand what is happening to you and what you thnik about it if you lack the words to explain the situation properly? My vocabualary is stuffed with confabulatory nouns, verbicides like "perhaps," and shadowy adjectives of-no-fixed-abode. Yours, no doubt, contains many candied euphemoes and lisping multi-syllables. And possibly we both enjoy adopting pretentious Gallicisms, such as Non-Lieux, or "Non-Places."
Non-Places are apparently those super-functional, transitional environments that delude us into believing that we are active participants in some dynamic global network connected by the airport lounge, the twenty-four-hour motorway service station, the midnight ATM, the lobby of any international commercial franchise. Non-Places are fabricated from a sort of modern architectural muzak: slabs of polished glass and marble forming endless sky-ways and mezzanines that are filled with digital information and plasma screen advertising, providing instant access, instant consumption and instant gratification in an impersonal world of PIN numbers, passwords and barcodes. They are everywhere and nowhere; the terminus of human identity in an abstract space and time.
Personally, I have a lot of time for the theory of Non-Places since I spend an inordinate amount of my life within their borders, and consequently the term has been added to the "regular usage" section of my self-defining lexicon. Mind you, if I were mugged at an ATM I don't think I'd consider it a Non-Place anymore. The little cash-dispensing cubicle would then become the scene-of-the-crime: a post-theoretical interzone of violence and fear where knife blades flash and threats are growled in a self-fulfilling, fluorescent urban prophecy. However, most of the time I just withdraw a hundred bucks and move on to the shopping mall. This, of course, is how the Non-Place becomes a Non-Savings Account, and I don't need a French intellectual to explain that to me.

Barnicide

In ancient high-school days, when I was still jejune and passive enough to be coerced into obeying the orders of educational authority, I was cast by some sado-masochistic teacher in a wretchedly melodramatic theatrical entertainment called The Murder in the Red Barn.
I played the role of William Corder in a costume of fake black mustache and itchy, ill-fitting frock coat, and despite being the main antagonist, the character with blood on his hands, I don't recall having many lines. These consisted of making staccato, poorly enunciated plans to rendezvous with my victim, Maria, in the red barn of the title, and then about twenty minutes later reappearing on stage mumbling "And now I shall kill you," while pretending to fire a plastic flintlock pistol at the poor actress opposite, who was no doubt posing awkwardly amid the prop pitchforks and other bucolic bric-a-brac.
The entire experience left me with a deep and abiding aversion to agricultural buildings of any color, and a brief but absorbing desire to either shoot or stab the blackboard-creeping buffoon who had forced me to endure it in the first place. His name was Mr Snead and long may the demons of Hell wipe their backsides with his face. The only good drama teacher is a frustrated English teacher with the sense to realize that he must abandon the annual school play due to lack of interest.
Barns, on the other hand, I admit, do have their place in the world, albeit in the middle of nowhere, windswept and dilapidated, perhaps even picturesque. But a new barn is no good to no-one, except the manure-splattered yokel who needs a place to park his combine harvester and store his sacks of dirt. In fact, the only barns worth bothering about are those that look as if they might collapse about your head at any moment. Here can be found the ghosts of autumnal gourds, rusting scythes, hobos sleeping it off on the journey southward, barrels of inky rainwater providing stagnant oceans for the sailing of russet leaves.

And they needn't be red, either. 

I photographed these barns in the Hudson River Valley, which often seems to be a sort of barn graveyard where old store houses go to die or are reborn as antique shops. Some of the barns here are of such an indeterminate age and usefulness that they could be called wooden Rip Van Winkels. Now these are barns worthy of committing murder in, or at least burying a drama teacher up to his neck in hog offal in.

Phonographogram

As collector, connoisseur, and slightly puzzled owner of one of those microfiber LP cleaning brushes complete with tiny bottle of unidentifiable fluid, I have always been extremely proud of my rare vinyl copy of 'The Essential Chad Bragadin.' Not only are there a scant two copies of Chad's recording in existence, but you don't have to balance coins on the head of your hi-fi stylus when you play it either. Furthermore, my "advanced white-label" copy was presented to me by the Sultan of Woorp'd-al-Scratzz during that long, hot summer of 1987 when I was busily employed booking circus acts at the local oasis. Indeed, much of the rarity of The Essential Chad Bragadin is due to the fact that the Sultan had the unfortunate singer beheaded in the autumn of that year, subsequently decreeing that the LP be renamed 'The Inessential Chad Bragadin (Peace Be Upon His Singing)' into perpetuity. So the upshot of Chad's execution and the Sultan's whim is that all later pressings are known by the longer, negative name and only mine and the harem's copies still retain the original positive, shorter title.
You may be wondering what all this musical history has to do with my recent trip to Venice. Well, just examine the track-listing of Chad's album:

Side One: Battle of Lepanto; I Ain't No Infidel; Doge's Dirge; Remember Malta; Out Of My Skin.

Side Two: The Bragadin Blues; Hey Turk; Queen of the Adriatic; (I Won't Be) Your Galley Slave; Lepanto Reprise

I suppose the Sultan had always admired Chad's voice - "shades of early Ted Muezzin" - but was never entirely convinced by his choice of material, influenced as it was by sixteenth-century Venetian conflicts with the Ottoman empire, an artistic peccadillo that surely accounts for Chad's lack of commercial success in mainstream markets also.
Finally, I have conservatively valued my copy of The Essential Chad Bragadin at nine-thousand-dollars, but am willing listen to all reasonable offers.

Going, Going, Gondola

Venice: the preternatural city. Having just returned from there I find myself unable to understand why I've never visited before, since Venice contains within its watery contours all the elements of life I like most: scandalous history, narrow streets, ornate cafes and elegant domes, campari and aperol, umpteen bridges and canals, laconic water craft, expensive chocolate, mysterious artworks and mosaics, salted cod, gray mist and yellow sunlight, unusual doorknobs, and empty palaces ad infinitum.

I will write a longer post next week, when my mind returns to normal mode. Until then, one wonders what desperately moronic advertising strategy convinced Geox brand shoes that erecting huge, disfiguring billboards around the Bridge of Sighs will sell their wretched, and presumably extremely uncomfortable products.