I’m not young, trendy or pretty enough to truly appreciate my current hotel room. It has no chairs; only a reclining bit of moulded plastic that looks not unlike the lid of an Etruscan sarcophagus. http://www.menyawolfe.com/wolf/sarc.jpg
There are no shelves or drawers or anything as boring or useful as that. No, I am instead blessed with silver disks poking out of the wall and recessed cubby-holes. The “closet” is a six-inch deep spring-loaded vertical mousetrap which snaps open when you press it and would not hold two shirts on hangers. I have placed in it one pair of recently sink-laundered underpants but the socks I washed at the same time have to drip on the floor outside because there simply wasn’t enough room for them.
The dominant feature of the room is undoubtedly the shower because, and you might have to pause for a moment to get a clear mental picture of this, it is in the middle of the floor.
I have stayed in some shit-hole dives before where the toilet, sink and shower all cohabited in the same phone booth size cubicle but I confess that having a shower as the centrepiece of the bedroom is a new one to me.
The sink is just to the left of the shower, again with no amenities like any place to set your toothbrush. The bed is attached to the platform that holds the shower and sink. Next to my head is a little box with an impressive array of buttons that control the blinds, the lights but not, unfortunately, the noise level from the club on the floor below.
Encircling the shower, my room and indeed the entire hotel is Rome. Once you strip aside the graffiti, the tourist choked sidewalks and the clip joints (€9 for a beer) it is difficult not to be impressed by Rome.
When I was an impoverished student living off my credit cards, I charged up a three-week Italian sojourn. Adhering to all the tired clichés, I arrived in Rome with a backpack, tan shorts and a Eurorail pass. It was summer, it was baking hot, I knew three words in Italian and I didn’t understand the money. Somehow I managed to find my way up the coast to Cinque Terra, Pisa, Florence and, regrettably, Milan where I was confronted with and baffled by, Mussolini’s enormous Central Train Station.
Anyone who says all roads lead to Rome has never travelled through Italy. If they had they would have realised that all roads, train tracks and footpaths lead to Milan. Not only do they lead there, they stop there and it is damn near impossible to find your way out.
Not liking Milan has become something of a hobby of mine. It is a very, very easy city to despise and for all the right reasons: it’s ugly, it’s dirty and the traffic is horrendous. These attributes separated it not at all from most other large cities and to be fair, Milan has two things worth seeing: the Domo (lots of spiky bits) and The Last Supper (lots of pealing-off bits). It also has gelato. Exceptionally good gelato as a matter of fact. It also has one of my favourite hotels: the Diana Majestic and some pretty decent restaurants.
Right, so apart from the hotel, the Da Vinci, the cathedral, gelato and restaurants, what has Milan ever done for me? Bah!
To be perfectly honest the only reason I went to Italy with my backpack in the first place was to try and hook up with a girl I had been wanting to sleep with for over a year. I managed, through cunning, bribery, threats and dumb luck to find myself alone with her for the last week of my visit which is a testament to both my determination and lust. For anyone who has actually bothered to read any of my earlier blog entries, it should come as no surprise that I utterly failed to get off with her or anyone else on my trip and returned to California sunburnt and heartbroken.
It is somewhat ironic then that about three years later I found myself in a shower with this same woman starting what would turn out to be a rather pleasant few months of fucking like weasels. But I digress.
The streets of Rome, are filled with rubble. Ancient footprints are everywhere. You can almost think that you’re seein’ double on a cold, dark night on the Spanish Stairs.
-Bod Dylan
My only glimpse of the Spanish Stairs on this trip to Rome was from the open rear window of a taxi and even then my view was obscured by a pack of motor-scooters.
You have to hand it to the Romans, they incorporate their antiquity into their modernity in such a way that it is sometimes difficult to differentiate where one style stops and the other begins. They put flats on top of markets built by Trajan, they drive cars on cobblestone roads that still have the grooves from oxcarts gouged into them; they get water from aqueducts built by men who have been dead for two-thousand years. In short, they recognise their past and build on it- literarily.
London, eating peanut butter toast, watching squirrels drink from the birdbath in the garden and avoiding going to the gym. According to my schedule I should be on a plane to Milan right now but the Gods of Available Occupancy intervened and threw a furniture convention there and every hotel, apartment and cardboard box is booked up.
Suddenly finding myself in the UK for a weekend has made me inexplicably happy and that bothers me. If I am beginning to appreciate London for something other than its close proximity to the rest of Europe I’m going to have to seriously re-evaluate my lifestyle choices. Truth be told, I’m very much in the middle of re-assessment mode at the moment; I have even dragged my cameras off the top shelf and tentatively, haltingly, run a few rolls through them.
Oh dear Lord, I can’t be serious. I can’t even be thinking about wanting to be a photographer again can I? I need to remember what it was like: the poverty, the horrible assignments, the insufferable press conferences at places like the County Jail, the Water Department or the Election Commission. Remember San Francisco? Remember working as a freelancer for three news outlets, shooting artwork, having a full-time job and still not being able to make the credit card payments? Remember going to open studios just so you could eat free cheese and crackers? Tell me, what exactly do you miss about that?
Just about everything.
Fuck. I am in trouble.
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