Today is the 400th anniversary of Tom's Departure

A picture from Padua's railway station

Thanks Tom for inspiring my walk, changed my life - a little

And in other news: the Venice bottom snapper has finally been caught.

Normal walking service will shortly resume: I'm writing an academic paper on trust
and it's taking a little time.

Coming soon: The Rhine

A piece I wrote for The Times on Italian towns.

And Shakespeare might have made it to Venice as well as Tom. Read more here.

Another way to cross the Alps?

Tommy in Venice (I)

"…The first place of Venice that was inhabited, is that which now they call the Rialto, which word is derived from rivus altus, that is, a deep river, because the water is deeper there then about other Islands. And the first that dwelt in the same Rialto was a poore man called Joannes Bonus, who got his living there by fishing….

The Citie is divided in the middest by a goodly faire channel, which they call Canal il grande. The same is crooked, and made in the form of a Roman S….also both sides of this channel are adorned with many sumptuous and magnificent palaces that stand very neare to the water, and mae a very glorious and beautifull shew. For many of them are of a great height three or four stories high, most being built with bricke, and some few with faire free stone. Besides they are adorned with a great multitude of stately pillers made partly of white stone, and partly of Istrian marble. Their roofes doe much differ from those of our English buildings. For they are all flat and built in the manner as men may walk upon them, as I have often observed. What forme of roofing is generally used in all those Italian cities that I saw, and in some places of France, especially in Lyons, where I could not see as much as one house but had a flat roofe….



…Every Palace of any principall note hath a prety walke or open gallery betwixt the wall of the house and the bricke of the rivers banke, the edge or extremity whereof is garnished with faire pillers that are finely arched at the top. This walke serveth for men to stand in without their houses, and behold things…Somewhat above the middle of the front of the building, or, (as I have observed in many of their Palaces) a little beneathe the toppe of the front they right opposite unto their windows, a very pleasant little terrasse, that jutteth or butteth out from the main building: the edge wherof is decked with many prety little turned pillers, either of marble or free stone to leane over. These kinde of tarrasses or little galleries of pleasure Suetonius calleth Meniana. They give great grace to the whole edifice, and serve only for this purpose, that people may from that place as from a most delectable prospect contemplate and view the parts of the City around them in the coole evening. Withall I perceived another thing in their buildings…The foundations of their houses are made after a very strange manner. For whereas many of them are situate in the water, whensoever they lay the foundation of any house they remove the water by certaine devices from the place where they lay the first fundamentall matter. Most commonly they drive long stakes into the ground, without the which they doe aggerere molem, that is raise certaine heapes of sand, mudde, clay, or some other such matter to repell the water. Then they ramme in great piles of wooded which they lay very deepe, upon the which they place their bricke or stone, and so frame the other parts of the building. These foundations are made so exceeding deep, and contrived with so great labour, that I have heard they cost them very neare the third part of the charge of the whole edifice….



…it is said there are in the City of Venice at the least a hundred and twenty goodly Palaces, the greatest part whereof is built upon the sides of this great Channel.

…There is only one bridge to go over the great channel, which is the same that leadeth from St. Marks to the Rialto, and joyneth together both the banks of the channel. This bridge is commonly called Ponte di Rialto, and is the fairest bridge by many degrees for one arch that ever I saw, read, or heard of. For it is reported that it cost about fourscore thousand crownes, which doe make four and twenty thousand pounds sterling." [2.789 million now – a decent sized house in Hampstead]…

Is the Earth More Free?

“…Watch the manoeuvres of the week-end hikers
Massed on parade with Kodaks or with Leicas…”
Letter to Lord Byron

At the beginning of this trip I wrote of W.H. Auden’s poem, “Dover” which caught so well the essential nature of Kent’s port town - and gateway to Europe – seventy years ago. Shortly before the poet’s stay there with Isherwood in 1937, Auden visited Iceland. Which produced the long state of the nation (seen from away, home thoughts and all that) poem: “Letter to Lord Byron.” It is a (highly sophisticated) kind of blogging in transit, and conversation across time.

“For since the British Isles went Protestant
A church confession is too high for most.
But still confession is a human want,
So Englishmen must makes theirs now by post
And authors hear them over breakfast toast.
For, failing them, there’s nothing but the wall
Of public lavatories on which to scrawl.

…I have, at the age of twenty-nine
Just read Don Juan and I found it fine.

I want a form that’s large enough to swim in,
And talk on any subject that I choose,
From natural scenery to men and women,
Myself, the arts, the European news:
And since she’s on a holiday, my muse
Is out to please, find everything delightful
And only now and then be mildly spiteful."

Auden celebrates in imitation (though not content) a man, a style, and an approach that doesn’t appear to resonate so well with our times. He echoes both Byron’s “Don Juan” and “Child Harold”.

Lord Byron, mad, bad and dangerous to know, represents the spirit of a different age, and though his “idea” has had many revivals since the early part of the nineteenth century, I reckon his stock is low at the moment. Or as Auden wrote of his own time in the mid 1930s:

“The vogue for Black Mass and the cult of devils
Has sunk. The Good, the Beautiful, the True
Still fluctuate about the lower levels
Joyces are firm and there there’s nothing new
Eliots have hardened just a point or two.
Hopkins are brisk, thanks to some recent boosts
There’s been some further weakening in Prousts”

At my school in the 1970s Byron’s fellow “Romantic poets” Wordsworth, Keats and Coleridge got a better press; Byron was always thought a little “light”. Reading Byron later in life his poetry comes across as remarkably modern: worldly, serious and yet effortless. His life – and certainly his loves – speaks to that rock and roll lifestyle that might have happened in the sixties and seventies, whilst his work reflects a high and subtle intelligence utterly lacking the ponderous emphasis of a Wordsworth; these days a McEwan. “Child Harold” gives us the fully rounded, fatally flawed “Byronic” hero, filled with ennui, in search of something.

Child Harold is a long verse drama; its protagonist is an English nobleman making a Tom-style grand tour of Europe, albeit with a little more action with the ladies. More than this the places he visits give up a little of their stories as he wanders, post the Napoleonic wars…

“…Gaul may champ the bit
And foam in fetters; - but is the Earth more free?”

…in search of an elusive way to be. One academic writes that these places are “a sequence of geo-historical spots with pre-existent narratives, spots that in some sense speak for themselves. Looking at it this way round Byron might be seen as a brilliantly individual amanuensis to whom the European landscape is dictating its histories, while his psychological interiority is an effect that the poem’s places produce as their histories are articulated.”

That’s the hope for all writing which encompasses the idea of travel and the individual consciousness: Tom Coryat being the “first”, and – in the end – not prepared to reveal the personal side of this journeys, preferring the studied and the observed, is rarely, save for Venice, possessed by place enough to let it dictate to him. To free his mind.

“What exile from himself can flee?
To zones though more and more remote,
Still, still pursues, where’er I be,
The blight of life – the demon Thought.”

Only when this “possession” takes place; is the starting point of observation and then communication, can what I think of as a “lost” Europeanism be grasped. It is not just the churches, (I have seen a lot in Venice, without joy, they are backdrops to photo-shoots and audio guides), the art (collected at auction, or on memory card for one-day download to I-Photo), can any description be meaningful. Or rather, can be helpful.



And all this is done in “Child Harold” without seeming effort: neither this quality, nor the light and the subtle that are Byron’s stock in trade are not high-priority in our zeitgeist now: we prefer more stolidly laboured prose; something tied far more closely to either complete fantasy or the grimly suffered; or linked with celebrity for its own sake, rather than artistic excellence. I am sure Byron would have enjoyed Richard Dawkins crusade for atheism. Would have enjoyed his celebrity though, no doubt of that.

As he claimed to have slept with 200 women in 200 days in Venice (and Italian critics still often refer to him as a homosexual: an interesting definition) what is, perhaps, most surprising is the final impact of Venice on Europe’s leading Romantic ‘trouser snake”. Venice tamed even Byron

“But midst the crowd, the hum, the shock of men,
To hear, to see, to feel, and to possess,
And roam along, the world’s tired denizen,
With none who bless us, none whom we can bless;
Minions of splendour shrinking from distress!
None that, with kindred consciousness endured,
If we were not, would seem to smile the less,
Of all that flatter’d, follow’d. sought and sued;
This is to be alone; this, this is solitude!”

Instead of the wild, womanising figure we know Venice turned Byron into a somewhat formal character; he takes up an almost “courtly” role as a “cavalier servente.” This was a very Italian institution in form, convention, pragmatism and infidelity. He became the approved “partner” of a married woman, Theresa, with the utter acceptance of her husband: his duties included carrying her bag, standing behind her at the Opera. Whilst he could write of marriage: “That moral centaur, man and wife…” he became part of the bureaucracy. Yes, Venice neutered even Byron.

It is no surprise that today Venice neuters pretty much everyone and everything.
More on that tomorrow.

Venice: Had 'em all

“I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices…”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile


If you type “Venice, Loneliness” into the database at the British Library there is one result: Leo Damrosch’s fantastic biography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. If you type in “Venice, Love”, there are many more options, many of them Mills & Boon fictions.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau lived in Venice for over a year between 1743-4. He worked as Secretary to the French Ambassador, a man named Montaigu. “I made my duties my sole pleasures,” Rousseau writes in “The Confessions”.

We are the stories we live in, as well as the ones we tell. And discovering that the Rousseau I imagined, or ignorantly created, in Chambery, a picture of a man communing with nature and his lover at “les Charmettes”, is as close to a “story” as it is a truth, isn’t a shock, but it is a reminder of how easy it can be to believe the propaganda: in this case the local tourist literature in France.

Rousseau stands to some as a romantic hero of the individual trying to find a route into “honesty”: to find him living in the Querini palace, in the Canareggio district of Venice, busily and rather badly drawing up official letters, and making the diplomatic gestures required of the de facto head of the French Embassy is strange. Strange and for me somehow rather human, proving that almost nothing is as black and white as it might seem.




Venice had lost much of its status by this time, was not the powerful trader nation of the fifteenth or even sixteenth century, nevertheless it must have fascinated Rousseau. Venetians refused to meet foreigners, its nobles were forbidden to speak outside the Republic. His employer, the Ambassador Montaigu, “wrote ineptly and spoke no Italian,” so Rousseau had a free run at many things. For six months in 1744 he ran the Embassy, whilst Montaigu was in a country house on the Brenta. His greatest pleasure here was to listen to music: perhaps it is not well known that Rousseau was an acclaimed musician, and lyricist, as well as everything else: one of this operas was played at the wedding festivals for Louis XV and Marie Antoinette. How many “revolutionaries” can claim that, I wonder?

A while ago I decided that it is the “Betwixt” that must be central to the remainder of this journey, and so I return to Rousseau here in Venice because the creation I found in Chambery is less than half the story, in fact is almost an irrelevance, however easy it is to be beguiled by the idyllic location, and the perfect house with its glorious Alpine views. Here too are such things.

Reading his works, and academic texts about him, what is striking is how much he achieved, given a late start: Rousseau’s artistic life doesn’t begin until he’s around 32, 33. Since strong claims can be made that Rousseau: developed a political theory which deeply influenced the founding fathers and the French revolutionaries; that he helped to invent modern anthropology; that he wrote highly influential theories of education; that “The Confessions” virtually created what we know as “autobiography”; and that modern psychology owes him an immense debt, then half pictures won’t suffice. And this entry is just a start.

Who would have thought of Rousseau and Venice; even more, who would have thought of Rousseau, like Tom Coryat, meeting with beautiful courtesans – and failing miserably. With one named Zulietta, he gets to her bedroom, where she shows him two pistols…”I endure their caresses, but I don’t intend to endure their insults, and I won’t miss the first one who behaves like that,” she warned him. Unsurprisingly given Rousseau’s complex sexual landscape – he enjoyed being beaten, and being “submissive” – things didn’t work with Zulieta, despite her charms, she told him: “Little John, leave the ladies alone, and study mathematics…” the thing is: Rousseau writes this in his Autobiography (the word Autobiography was not invented until the C19th) : a confession so honest as to be painful.

What sets Rousseau apart from his Enlightenment contemporaries – he was friends with Diderot, Hume and Voltaire later in life, though would fall out with each – is his social Betwixt-ness. His humble, poverty-wracked nomadic wanderings through France from an early age – which brought him twice to ChambÈry - his jobs working on a Land Registry, for a Police chief in Lyon, copying music; his being sent by his eventual lover, Madame de Warens, to a hospice in Turin (which means he made the same journey as Tom and I, over the Mont Cenis pass and down through the Susa valley) where he was probably abused, all add to the texture of a man who became a major European literary celebrity, and then a political refugee. And now – I think - something of a forgotten man. A restoration of this very “European” sensibility is required, I feel.

“Mobile and rootless, cut loose from the ties of kinship and locality, he was very much a modern, and a fundamental aspect of his modernity is that he relied on friendship to create a personal equivalent of community. But though he yearned for intimacy in friendship, he was never much good at it.” Leo Damrosch writes.

“Rousseau was unhappy all his life because he sought the kind of friend of which ten or so, perhaps, have existed from Homer’s time until our.” Stendhal said.

Casanova remembers him differently, as: “equally undistinguished either in his person or his wit…the eloquent Rousseau had neither the temperament to laugh nor the divine talent of calling forth laughter…”




One of the things this trip teaches is that everywhere has somebody, or something, they can commemorate. From the fallen Australian soldiers whose graves fleck northern France, to the mystic Hildegarde of Bingen in Germany (to come). On the other hand Venice, like Casanova - one of its more colourful sons - appears to have had them all. Not only this but Venice’s stories encompass, (or are on my mind this morning) law, race, art, sex, travel itself, music, trade, and Islam (there’s a show on now at the Duke’s Palace about the relationship Venice has enjoyed with Islam). It can throw up a Guggenheim birthday celebration (later this month) and Bob Sinclair, a famous dance DJ, doing something on the Lido.

So too the lives of the great: they are full of stories that pull interpretation one way or another. I often feel this tacking sensation when trying to appreciate Tom Coryat, who is a minor player in all this, but was the first English tourist – and that is important as I face the Venetian Tourist “experience”.




Rousseau believed that paradoxes were puzzles that exposed contradictions at the heart of experience. Much more than this, he gave us at the end of this life a stunning psychological last act, an autobiography that defines a new moment in literary honesty.

In his biography of Rousseau, Damrosch argues that: “Contemporary America talks the Rousseau line but lives the Franklin life.” By which he means that Benjamin Franklin’s famous autobiography “encourages readers to construct a public life, while Rousseau’s confessions challenges them to make a journey into the self.” And “These are the fundamental tensions in modern life, and their first great analyst was Jean-Jacques Rousseau”.

The relation of the public and the journey into the self is one of the major paradoxes of Venice too. Perhaps even of blogging itself.

Guess Where

Oh Venice, city of Angels

Diesel jeans just in case you wondered, are Italian, the owner is from Padua.

And is he not happy with the prices in Venice either

"Mr Rosso (52), who comes from nearby Padua, said that they had enjoyed the orchestra that plays at Florian's but had been stunned when they found that the bill included an extra charge of €5.80 a head for "entertainment".

"My wife and I had a spritzer each, for which the charge was €22," he told 'Il Giornale'. The price of the drinks was steep enough on its own, "but it's the music charge that scandalises me most of all", he said."

Betwixt Venice

“This is a fabulous, extraordinary madhouse. Beams of light shoot down from Baroque ceilings on the masses of earnest morons flinging their money down the drain…”

Noel Coward’s diaries, 1954

“I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices…”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, 1762

The last time I was in Venice I experienced something close to serious nervous breakdown.

The crowds, the tourist hysteria, the flash photography, the bustle of San Marco square, the confusing back-streets, the wildly expensive restaurants and shops, the Murano glass at ridiculous prices, the sense of decay, the expensive gondola journeys, the empty “floating signifiers”, all those gore-splattered death-heavy movies made about the City of Angels on my mind…

…were nothing to do with it.

Flying home to Manhattan was the first and last time I said: “thank goodness for the quiet of the West Village.”

What brought about the feelings of acute alienation, depression and claustrophobia was an accumulation of stories I lived-in for three Venetian days and nights. They were as follows: in the pre-lapsarian American flight world of spring 2001 I hopped a security-lite Jet Blue plane from JFK to Las Vegas to attend a three day conference on mobile communications. I was meeting up with a group of executives from a large mobile phone company there: we were close to doing business, the odds about 60:40 in our pipeline favour. Before the crashes, that is. So we “hung” together, and I picked up the tabs in search of “client chemistry”.

Even at the airport in Vegas there were many slot machines, gambling is omnipresent, and Bermuda shorts. Only English superiority and bad teeth got me through; that, and a thorough knowledge of the narrative themes, and robust theme-music, of “Diamonds Are Forever”.

Check-in at The Venetian Hotel, Sheldon Adelson’s profitable one-dimensional homage to Italy’s Venice, took an hour, and then the walk to the elevators, and so the rooms, a lengthy trek past most of the busy gaming tables – bad design? I thought so at first. And it was loud; loud with some plaintive noise far beyond sound, perhaps it was what the English poet Al Alvarez calls the “collapse of confidence in the utility of work.”

The conference is about the “future” of cell phones; the downtime very much about the orgasmic moment of jackpot at cards, craps, roulette; later: sex, drugs and rock and roll – occasionally food. [Was Alice Cooper playing at the Bellagio? Or Nirvana?] The line to take a taxi from the Venetian is about an hour, day or night. There is no escape. Although at some stage I was in the House of Blues, or the Hard Rock Hotel, and at the next table Keannu Reeves is playing poker – perhaps. Or Slash. That actress from "Showgirls". And sometime else in the 72 hours I listen to a man “be” Sammy Davis jnr. Or Celine Dion. Was there a circus as well? Circuses? Flames and carnival, and masks? Probably.

On the first night I went for a solitary escapist post-conference drink in the then-red modernist “V” bar, because it looked vaguely not European, sorta Manhattan: as my home city was rapidly taking on the role of “Eden” in my floating mind – and there was an over-choice of about twenty bars in “Venice” in those days. Here at the “V” I met a man who said he was the “second richest man in England”. He had a Midlands accent and crisp white collars & cuffs and a business making thin mobiles (when there were none), and he bought $15 martinis for many with little reluctance. Upstairs online in my room I discovered he was. Though with the falling-through of a later take-over deal or something - the current expectation of which had led to a massive share price rise in his company, thus “the second richest Englishman” tag - he wasn’t on the fortunate five hundred charts for very long. Certainly not long enough for client chemistry with me. I still have his card somewhere.

I had dinner, somewhere (was it the best steak house in Nevada?) but still no gambling. I watched my would-be clients win big, and lose. They told me their secrets. I tried to smile. Later I met a guy who’d been at MIT doing math who was part of a “counting” syndicate. He said he had a life expectancy of five weeks. (It was months before I understood what that was about). I went to the conference again, and listened to the future some more. It was Babel (America didn’t do text messaging then, not really) without Brad Pitt or mute Japanese schoolgirls. That night I returned to the “V” bar, but a little later. A chill-out party was taking place for a rapper who’d just played the House of Blues. A mellow kind of vibe ensued: half dressed women lay face down on designer leopard-print sofas and wiggled like Loreleis and mermaids and undines; rap-entouragers checked the goods, then fondled them; some just dived right on in. There was dancing too. Which was quite good. Rappers dance better than tourists and gamblers, I noted. Then one rapper – let’s call him “X” – took out a gun. Which waz badd. There was an argument about a girl, it seemed. I was near the bar, away from the dance floor, and talking at the time to an elderly woman about living in Vegas; I’d bought her a whiskey and she told me about the old days – in the 1980s. Reagan: whadda guy.

With the gun’s emergence we all hit the floor and made screaming noises. Then Mr. “X” made a run for the door – where outside there was an ugly Bermuda’d line waiting impatiently for access. At some point a large security guard hit him rather hard; Mr “X” went down as heavily as shortly would an Enron executive. [At this point in History, Enron was still on our client wish-list “pipeline”, it being the “future” of energy. NB. My would-be clients with me at the Venetian were all fired in September in one of those big global murders and acquisitions].

We stood up. My elderly friend said: “I hate it when they do that.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I’ve never seen a gun before.”
“No, stupid. When people hit the floor just because some asshole pulls a gun. Mine’s a Jack [Daniels].”

I didn’t want to stay for long, though I bought a few more Jacks, and sank some martinis, but the mood had gone, curiously, with the dancing. Then I went out to practice amateur semiotics on the gaming floor over a beer-lite. The French thinker, Jean Baudrillard, I read, calls all of this stuff the “negation of the sign as value…” Soon I was sitting at a bar-rotunda with touch-screen “Blackjack” instead of coasters. Where I negated $2 worth of my own value. The gun still seemed to me very much not a negation of value though, so I drank some more beer-lite and negated $2 more gambling on 21s. Then again, I thought, Mr. “X” went down quite stage-ily: perhaps that too was part of the mis-en-scène?

In the Las Vegas of early 1960, when his chances of becoming President of America were still “emergent”, John F. Kennedy had a ball. “Half the people he met there thought that ‘Senator’ was just his nickname…” an onlooker once said.

“Dallas” was wearing a very nice dress from Prada, I noticed. She asked me how I was. I said I was a little low, told her about the gun incident. “You need some company,” she said from around the Rotunda. I bought a lavish glass of champagne for her. As in Tom Coryat’s Venice, so too in Sheldon Adelson’s: certain courtesans have a special status. “To sleep with you is $12,000,” she said, with a smile. “”Oral is $4000.”

Like Tom Coryat in Venice, I explained that I was merely talking;soon conquered the blushing and speed-dictated my history as a journalist on a liberal newspaper - and in England. But as such I was still intrigued to know who might pay these fees: yes, I was sure having a “special pass” to go upstairs wasn’t “cheap”; but $12,000?

“Look around these tables,” Dallas said. “Every night a few people, men or women, get very lucky indeed. And when you get lucky you celebrate. I am just their tip.”

I left Dallas in pursuit of tipsters and oral-cheapskates and went upstairs one floor, braving one of the things I’d spent two and half days trying to avoid: the two-thirds scale recreation of San Marco square, complete with Tiepolo skies set permanently, thanks to the lighting, at two in the afternoon and opera-perfect gondoliers (actors, it seemed) with motor-driven gondolas. It was precisely twelve hours later than early afternoon.

Ray-Ban daylight wasn’t right for a half-drunk, half paranoid conference delegate thinking about the future of cell phones well past his bedtime; nor was the madness of $12 million paintings in the stores; singing gondoliers – tourists [tour groups, from “downstairs”] venturing out from their home (at the black-jack table or running the slot alleys). The air was pure, heightened. And – unlike Venice or a dot-com start-up – there were no exit strategies. No last train to Padua or Treviso or home here. I went outside somehow, where at three in the morning it is still ten degrees hotter than inside. Someone had designed the exterior walls to have quotes in Latin. Perhaps I read a few lines of Virgil, or Petrarch. The taxi line was still an hour. Anyway, where to go? Eygpt? Paris? Luxor? The Moon? Watch the Titanic go down again?

I watched movies most of the rest of the night, slept little; I couldn’t sweat though, because the air conditioning control was too complex. In the morning, the last day of the conference, I went to the elevator. Inside the lift flanked by two security guards was President Jimmy Carter, our keynote for today. It was hard to concentrate on his “vision”, though everyone stood for his entrance and made appreciative sounds. At the lift door I just smiled. Of course. There wasn’t much about cell phones in the speech, but a lot about hope, I recall, and smiles. Later I skipped the round-tables and closure sessions and holed up in my room and watched a rerun of “Mission Impossible” on the Pay For View twice over edible room service (food).

Insanity seemed very close indeed.

Then I flew home. Most of my friends didn’t believe any of these stories. Was I reading Damon Runyon at the time? Yes, but... They’d been going to Vegas for years and the worst that happened to them was losing a house. They said things such as:

"Some take a lover, some take drams or prayers
Some mind their household, others dissipation.
Some run away, and but exchange their cares,
Losing the advantage of a virtuous station;
Few changes e’er can better their affairs,
From the dull palace to the dirty hovel:
Some play the devil, and then write a novel."

But it all really happened, just as described.

When the Venetian hotel opened in Vegas in 1999 Massimo Cacciari, then mayor of Venice [Italy], called the project “a circus tent of bad taste.” Later this month The Venetian Macau opens down Asia way: the cheapest rooms are around $1000. In “Venice, the tourist maze – a cultural critique of the world’s most touristed city” written in 2004 by Robert C. Davis and Garry R. Marvin, the authors claim that The Venetian hotel complex has “emergent authenticity…” I wonder if, in “A Picture of Dorian Gray”-like way, Italy’s Venice thus has a disappearing authenticity. Once his Venetian franchise was up and running and raining in the dollars Sheldon Adelson said he sees Italian Venice with different eyes: it belongs not to Venice or Italy but the whole world.

Which must be a bummer for the copyright lawyers.

Last year in a bid to revitalize a fifty-three year old James Bond franchise under threat from those other lively “JBs” Jason Bourne and Jack Bauer, and the Vegas-y Ocean’s films and Ethan Hunt’s impossible missions, the Broccoli heirs returned to basics; tried to recreate the “authentic” school-bully Bond as envisioned by Ian Fleming in his 1953 novel, "Casino Royale". That meant casinos, tough-guy stuff, proper pectorals, no gadgets really, a terrorist banker, sadism, masochism, and a Venetian* ending – which artfully also mirrors the denouement of the film of Fleming’s From Russia With Love, Sean Connery’s second ur-Bond outing as 007 in 1963 – which came complete with a Matt Munro (who often sang in the “Sahara” in Las Vegas, once with Jack Benny) singalong that made the charts in the US and England but was voiced by someone else in France.

[*Venice is surely one of those “pure” Bond locations – like Vegas or Cannes or any Swiss ski slope.]

As realism goes the new streamlined Daniel Craig James Bond Casino Royale isn’t bad. The last reel destruction of the Venetian palazzo is almost a triumph of CGI, and the (faithful-to-the-novel) scrotal flagellation sequence, whilst “PG” for the obvious box-office of contemporary reasons, would still have inflamed the passions of pain-crazy Ian and Anne Fleming in the 1950s, I am quite certain.

And then, his Lorelei-love (Eva Green, last seen very naked in “The Dreamers”, Bernardo Bertolucci’s dire reworking of both the Paris riots of 1968 and Gilbert Adair’s rather good pastiche-of-Cocteau novel) drowned with the Palazzo, Daniel Craig as Bond gets into his gondola and takes out his laptop. Soon half the wide-screen is filled with an image of a big Sony Vaio computer – for the last e-mail clue to the whereabouts of the very bad banker-man and good-guy flagellator: which is a villa on Lake Como.

Symbolically, and in actuality, this is also one home of George Clooney, James Bond’s ultimate economic rival - what with Ocean’s 11, 12 and 13 and their modern and even more grittily authentic national theme for our “pathology of hope” generations: (which sees America as still about wanting and believing despite the odds) we may not beat all the terrorists but robbing a casino, again? No problem. That’s what we do best: robber-barons. Just look at our history books. Any nation’s.

With the arrival of the Sony Vaio on-screen what seems to some as crass product placement (the film’s studio producers, MGM and Columbia, are both owned by Sony, after all) is, I think, the moment of final modern authenticity in “Casino Royale”. Rather than staring Anschenbach-ly towards the Venice lido (and another dull but expensive art Biennale) how much more realistic to look the Lido sands (or Lake Como) up on Google Earth, nod wisely, and then slip downstairs to The Venetian Hotel’s ground floor Rialto and break the bank with the assistance of an MIT trained “counter”, and win the favours of “fair” Ms. Dallas for just one night? Or merely watch the now daily re-enactment of the “rapper with the gun” pageant in the “V” bar? I wonder who plays me? Matt Damon?

No, he’s Tommy Ripley, another face of Venice and Las Vegas. But he and Pat Highsmith are for later. Nick Cage maybe.

I hope I am ready for the Serenissima, Venice. A place that the author Mary McCarthy calls the “folding picture postcard of itself.” If not I guess there’s always Macau. August 28th is the grand opening, I note. Failing that somewhere on my portable hard drive there’s the "RIP" I made of the free DVD of “Don’t Look Now” that the Guardian newspaper gave away many Saturdays ago to boost circulation when posters of fish & fowl would not suffice.

“Everything, you see, is arranged here,” said Noel Coward, friend of Ian Fleming, in “Mr Coward Dissects Las Vegas” an article in the New York Times magazine of June 26th 1955 reflecting upon his re-making (and major re-financing, my they paid well, the Mafia) at the “Sands” hotel in Las Vegas (also the location to which this piece’s opening Coward quote alludes) where his risqué reworking of Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It” was a smash with the “comp’d” crowds and the Aga Khan, possibly Rita Hayworth as well. “And yet,” he added, “I suspect, there’s a tragic side.”

Whatever could he have meant?

.

Too much

It is hard, this travel and thinking; uprooted means new experience, but new experience often leads to a realization of how little one knows, or can know – or discover without a library or a university, a circle of people who know a few of the answers. Then the question becomes, is this journalism or autobiography? History or a kind of contemporary mania?

There is certainly much that isn’t yet written about the nature of our new world, and the new Europe – connected to every other part of the world not just by historic trade links, or intellectual trends, wars, colonies and nomadism of whatever type. But how to reduce it, this continent of wi-fi and terror laws; this place which is borderless to Europeans, where national identity is still such an issue? The simple idea was to follow Tom and receive experience; then to concentrate on ideas and things that “changed” the nature of Europe, and so – in some way – the rest of the world. Now it is both, and to try and define the modern “betwixt”.



And the modern “betwixt” is – of course – the hardest thing. It is generational and professional, it is citizen and nomad; art and commerce; philosophy and sex. It is so many things. But “Betwixt” it must be from now on: that is where we are, and so my journey evolves I think into an exploration of this alone.

Returning home for a few weeks to read more, to study in a great library, only heightens the paradoxes, buffets the early prejudices, and adds to the confusion. Contemporary life isn’t an easy generalization, and few try. Devils make their names in the details now; rhetoric is almost always undercut in a few choice replies on a newspaper blog. This is an example of how the balance of the betwixt can alter. If some have lost faith in "truth" while others ground themselves in remaking, or ancient religious texts, there is no way around the idea that we've moved into an age of "exception". Laws, morals, aesthetics, history, politics: all have a formal "canon", and then there are exceptions...

The challenge of the Renaissance, and now, in thought or art, or business that is to make the confusing simple: but we know so much more now than 1608, or at least have access to it, even if most of it we choose to ignore. I wonder if this is a time when history can't help us very much? When the "Betwixt" requires new ideas, not reworkings of older ones?

Rousseau cannot be seen alone, as some radical one-off; neither can his faults be ignored. And if we do ignore in the cause of his genius, then where to stop? With Byron? With Wagner? With Hitler? Rousseau talks and yearns for an honesty, yet is self-evidently a remaker of fact, a moaner; probably paranoid for a good part of his life - some say an egomaniac. But the work, the influence even now, lives on.

Question: do we simply misread all art and history, incapable of grapsing out of our own time?


Two great Europeans died today: Bergman and Antonioni. I wonder what that means?

It is time soon, I suppose, for mirrors.

To see what’s reflecting back from an island in Venice.

Why Venice and the art thing might seem a little less Europe; a little more "global"

From Hello magazine online; was the Mantua Times like this in 1608? It probably was:

"A West End stage debut can be a daunting prospect even for an actor whose star burns bright in Hollywood. So Orlando Bloom made sure he had some heavy duty support on the opening night of his play In Celebration at the Duke Of York theatre, having invited fellow creative mind Tracy Emin.

In the drama Kent-born Orlando, 30, portrays a son returning home for what will be a fraught party to mark his parents' ruby wedding anniversary.

And Tracy, fresh from her own triumph at the Venice Biennale, made it clear just what she thought of her friend's first stage outing during a get-together after the show. The 44-year-old artist threw her arms around the Pirates Of The Caribbean actor in an enthusiastic embrace, before having an animated chat with his mother Sonia.



The former wild child of British art was returning a compliment, as Orlando bought one of her famous neon light artworks last year. The piece had been donated by Tracy to the Raisa Gorbachev foundation, which funds children's healthcare projects in memory of Mikhail Gorbachev's wife. The sale earned her dinner with the former Russian leader."

"Millions to dreams" - here's one to dream about

"The culture-rich country lacks a major museum for contemporary work, but in Venice, businessman-art collector François Pinault sets out to correct that."

From today's LA Times. Venice suddenly seems less daunting. A bit.

Betwixt technology?

A vision of Venice to come perhaps? Oh, god. There I was saying technology could bring us together. This from the Sydney Morning Herald:

"PICTURE this. You're one of France's best-known living conceptual artists. You are 51 and visiting Berlin. Your mobile beeps; it's an email from your boyfriend. In a hideously self-absorbed message about human emotion, he dumps you electronically, saying it hurts him more than you. He signs off: "Take care of yourself." You're heartbroken. Then you think of its potential as art.

Sophie Calle has filled the French pavilion of the Venice Biennale with a praised exhibition about her emailed dumping letter. Over two years, she distributed the missive to 107 women professionals, photographed them reading it and invited them to analyse it, according to their job. The ex's grammar and syntax have been torn apart by a copy editor, his manners rubbished by an etiquette consultant and his lines pored over by Talmudic scholars. He has been reordered by a crossword-setter, evaluated by a judge, shot up by a markswoman, second-guessed by a chess player and performed by the actress Jeanne Moreau. A forensic psychiatrist decided he was a "twisted manipulator". The temple to a woman scorned is entitled Take Care of Yourself (Prenez soin de vois), immortalising lines that Calle, if she hadn't had recourse to the international art world, might have read again and again in tears.

"The idea came to me very quickly - two days after he sent it," she says. "I showed the email to a close friend asking her how to reply and she said she'd do this or that. The idea came to me to develop an investigation through various women's professional vocabulary."

More Sophie Calle in Venice...