Posts Tagged ‘anachronism’
ONE MAN’S VERDANT PORTICO
Is another man’s mortar: from Hadrian to Maxentius along the Appian Way, frescoed sea-horse becomes filler for an unfinished throne room wall. Our archaeological Virgil through it all (drawings, lacunae-riddled plans, 3D scanners, holes full of dirt and equivocal chunks) enjoying his job exactly as much as one reckons he oughta.
ANIMATE STATUARY
At the Villa Medici: from Paris to the Pincio, perfect coherence of voluptuousness in stone embraced otherwise, alive.
MEMORY
“I have turned from the castellaccio / so its…medieval shadow…/ does not leave uneven edges,” word by word infiltrating the idle mind even in beginning to walk toward the door of the dig house toward ascent of a town turning on a dream. Rubble of feudalism still operative as rubble and as resistance in the [...]
CASTLE WITH IMPATIENCE
Odescalchi, host of hushed stories of past horribleness, with dashboard, to be precise.
X LOCUS (ABLUVION)
“For those who submitted to disorientation, it was a success.” “Submit,” says Tom: “that’s the perfect word.” An old archaeologist friend, alongside whom I worked at my first and only dig, two decades ago, veering over the hole listening for voices. Hearing the unconscious, seeing the strata of history in the strata of bricks above [...]
IL CAFFÉ,…DOLCE, AMARO, INDOMABILE SERPENTE
Delighted to find a poem by the counter of the Casa del Caffé in the Campus Martius—a tradition in Italy, it seems—so that even the hairdresser’s business card is full of rhymes— “Coffee, it rustles my soul, like wind on the mount that breaks in amongst the oaks and loosens and agitates the limbs, sweetbitter, [...]
THE HOUSE EXPOSED E DOPO
How the writing of Marco Giovenale and other current Italian “poetry of research” can and has to be distinguished from Flarf, with which it identifies (to a certain extent): history. (fou / fenêtre) Glockenspiel – e nel freddo nel pieno è che il freddo è nel pieno della schiena: sulle scapole sulla spina per agosto [...]
NO GESTURE IS COMPARABLE TO THE LOVE I HAVE FOR YOU
Is the message on the aqueduct that has become bench, carpet, stadium seat for these Romans. Thinking it in retrospect & somewhat belatedly true.
USCITA 43/EXIT 43
The introduction to our performance at Corto Circuito tonight, in Italian: Queste partiture “pop-up” fanno parte di un progetto in corso, intitolato Uscita 43, che è composto di elementi poetici, visivi, e sonori. Lo descrivo come un’archeologia di paesaggi tossici e afflitti, e un’operetta di cori “pop-up” (prendendo il termine usato per le finestre “pop-up” [...]
FINANCE IN STONE (OR LEAD-COATED REPLICAS)
Puzzled indeed to find neoclassicism masking another paradox in the pediment sculpture of the core of global speculation: Integrity Protecting the Works of Man, among which bend heavily, here, Agriculture and Mining. It is the work of John Quincy Adams Ward and Paul Wayland Bartlett—carved in marble however by “the Piccirilli brothers.” The NYSE notes [...]
WIGHT
Following an interview with Curtis Fox, further research into the vagaries of the word “wight,” from the first cherished line of Shakespeare’s sonnet 106: by his time it means not just creature, but ghost.
WHY
does the day feel like it has nullified a decade I took (thanks to power icons) as having acquired wisdom (that outmoded concept)— of the memory of trauma long suffered that nationalism doesn’t mend, of justice and higher solutions to conflict?
X LOCUS NARRATIVE LOOP @ SOUNDCLOUD
A conversation-poem on national, cultural, linguistic and psychological dislocation created by Jennifer Scappettone—installed in the gravelly space inside a moat of liquid loggia projections and sculpted ambient fountain/fowl for X Locus, a collaboration between Scappettone, Paul Rudy, and Stephen Mueller and Ersela Kripa (AGENCY Architecture), held at the courtyard of the American Academy in Rome [...]
X LOCUS
On Thursday, April 28 at 8 PM in the cortile of the McKim, Mead and White Building at the American Academy in Rome, there will be an opening reception for a collaborative installation titled X LOCUS, featuring environmental media by Founders Rome Prize winners in Architecture Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller, sound by Elliott Carter [...]
ET Ἀρκαδία IN ACADEMIA OR ARCADIA, ERGO EGO
Just in time for the Poussin exhibit and a much-planned chilled coffee at the expensively bucolic Caffé Greco, the antique dealer’s daughter’s dealt a last-minute invitation to the Enlightenment-era academy of Arcadians you could tumble into down this hill were it not for the security cameras: where one isn’t sure what’s Rome and what reproduction, [...]
PROSERPINING
From Rome’s high galleries of modern art this morning I am whisked back to my 20-year-old encounter with the near godlette of spring in a Morgantina cistern, via two images of melancholy Persephone with her condemning pomegranate seed in fugues from the underworld. One of them, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, is accompanied by an Italian [...]
TAKE THAT, LATIN
in phonemic translation from translation out of a notebook running circles round the “past”‘s totem and taboo by Emilio Villa, taking inspiration from the delirium of the book et ab hic et ab hoc: batabìk batabòk patabot babeek babohk betock, betel & from the “here & from this re” lied book, The narrative Hoo— Hook
HYPOPRESENT
And the breathless dust of realization that obsession with the language of Emilio Villa and his precursors so deep down and far (hyperpast) really could drive a reader madly into the underbelly of the moment, delightsomely.
MELANCHOLY THEN & NOW
On the one hand, reproduction of a certain utopian scene that immeasurably enriched my life as an undergraduate—permitting a young student to imagine in greater detail the pantheon of possible ideal conversations. On the other, the certain melancholy that dawns when one is ushered out of the Sistine Chapel in barking English and ticketed signori—beings [...]
IL CONVIVIO
For days the phrases of musical compositions in the making ever more frequently arriving to punctuate my battling with paragraphs, through the thick walls and open windows of this 19th-century tavern on the highest hill of Rome: the same foundations of montorio having turned from the villa of Monsignor Innocenza Malvasio who had Galileo demonstrate [...]
IMMEDIATELY SO DREAMLESS
On the way to Santa Prassede, following the detour of buses, running into a truck whose emblem is a head inside a gear marked “San Precario” or “Saint Precarious”: A spirited, nearing joyous, parade against (re)becoming minds in flight: the demonstrations of precari, workers, researchers without security, enact their part of the “manifestazione continua” rising [...]
UNTIMELY
“I do not know what meaning classical studies could have for our time if they were not untimely – that is to say, acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come.” —Nietzsche, Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen Betrachtungen=observation: consideration: speculation. As to translation [...]