All The King’s Men Every time I think we have finally gotten past the shadow of the Donald Trump presidency, something takes me back and I find myself thrown back into the desperation of feeling like I’m that poor inmate stuck under the thumb of Ida Lupino, who plays an evil warden in the 1955 film Women’s Prison. The horror of that film is less about what goes on physically in the prison than the…
Dining at Termini It’s Monday morning in central Rome and I have a mission. We are here for a little more than a week with our friends Gary and Oswaldo. We have stayed the last two nights at a nice boutique hotel called Capo d’Africa, which is in between the Coliseum and St. John Lateran. So far we have spent a day walking five+ miles around town to go see some sights like the Boca…
Violence in Never OK Who among us has never gotten so mad or so aggrieved or so aggressive as to resort to violence to give emphasis and voice to our feelings? I believe few men can make that claim and probably most women would be unable to make that claim. I make the gender specification because it seems to me that there is some hard-wiring in the male psyche that defaults to violence when threatened.…
7,700 Steps Through Heaven Today we are in Rome with just a loose agenda of activities. We drove in yesterday from Amalfi and I dropped off the rental car at Stazione Termini while the gang found their way with the luggage to the AirBnB we had secured. The place is called The Spanish Penthouse in honor of the fact that it is at the base of Piazza de Spagna and is, indeed on the top…
Positano Yesterday we “did” the Amalfi Coast. Kim arranged a tour guide who drove over from Naples to drive us (technically, a guy named Renato did the driving) around the winding roads of the coast. After five minutes of the drive I realized that I was the real beneficiary of this choice, since driving and looking simultaneously is a high-risk maneuver, which i could thankfully forego. We start by heading to Ravello to the south,…
A Walk in the Clouds There is a wonderful 1995 film with Keanu Reeves and Anthony Quinn called A Walk in the Clouds. It is set in the vineyards of Northern California and is an epic tale of a family’s struggle to maintain its heredity among the changing winds of time that buffet the world after WWII. There is something about that time and place that resonates with me and whenever I see or think…
The Agony and the Ecstasy of Amalfi Today we awake to the brilliant Mediterranean Sea laid out before our eyes from the terrace of our AirBnB high up on a cliff overlooking the coastline. We have found and rented a very reasonable and very pleasant two-bedroom, two-bath apartment with a large terracotta terrace that looks like the perfect summertime place to while away the warm afternoons to the setting sun. Yesterday we spent the day…
Entering the Eternal City We are transiting through Munich at the moment, on our way to Rome, Fumicino Airport that sits between Rome and Ostia Antica. I have very specific memories of the Rome airport for a number of reasons. Back in high school we would fly in and out of Rome on TWA mostly, heading back to New York. It was around 1970 that Boeing introduced its new monster of the sky, the 747.…
The Glorious Mid-Century If you spend any time watching House Hunter shows on HGTV or DIY Network (aka Magnolia Network), you have watched people rave about mid-century this or mid-century that. It is not atypical that we look back at the past with rose-colored glasses. Every generation does it to some degree. The past always looks rosier, probably because we remember the good and forget the bad. There is also the reality that looking back…
Did Atlas Really Shrug? Who is Atlas anyway? We know, if we’ve been to Rockefeller Center, that he has the world on his shoulders. In mythology, he is a mere Titan, not a god, but a Titan, and he is tasked with holding up the sky and the heavens after he and his gang of Titans tried to overthrow the Olympians and failed. Failed coups are a bitch and there are consequences. Atlas must have…