Monthly Archives: June 2020

The Golden Lion

Wednesday, August 28

We got up early and drove back to the Venice Tronchetta to return the rental car, which needed to be back by 10am or it would cost a lot more.  We found that we could take a vaporetto directly from the Tronchetta, and didn’t need to use their silly people mover to add yet another step.  A ticket office there added a bunch of rides to our Venezia Unica cards, which we will have to renew the next time we go to Venice, since they expire in a year.

We walked to Cà dell’Angelo, the hotel we’ve stayed at the previous two times, which gave us a good rate for a long stay, and then met up with Johan, rode to Lido, where all the movies are, and saw our first two programs: the world premiere of Pelikanblut, in which a woman adopts an evil child, and tries too hard to make it work.  It was followed by the world premiere of La Vérité, with Catherine Deneuve by Kore-eda Hirokazu.  I wanted to see more of Ethan Hawke even though he was charged with making his character uninteresting, in furtherance of the character studies of the leads.  Also it was terribly inside-baseball, in the sense of presuming that the audience lives for understanding the process by which actors and writers produce.  In Venice that is a given, but I wonder about the prospects of such movies elsewhere.

Afterwards, dinner at Al Vecio Marangon, after getting off the ferry at Zattere and discovering that the places we were aiming at were closed.  A man was staring at me.  I thought he was angry because I was staring at his super good-looking son, but it turned out later he was trying to decide if we were ZZ Top.

After dinner, we headed off to the Corner Pub.  The bartender insisted on taking Johan out into the midnight street, so he could pull down his pants and show us his thigh tattoo.  I have never been able to inspire that level of sharing in the service economy.

Thursday, August 29

At the vaporetto stop, a publicist for the Film Festival wanted our photo, reading the brochure.  Subsequent interactions with strangers were more challenging.

The security at the Film Festival is high, but I think that the organizers must take on a lot of newcomers to swell their ranks.  At the pat down at the arrival point from the festival ferries to Lido, a security person (maybe even police) wanted me to remove my phone and my glasses from my pocket.  If the staff can’t tell an iPhone and a pair of glasses by touch, they haven’t searched enough American tourists.

First up was Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.  Pedro Almodóvar was getting a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.  We saw it many years ago.  I didn’t remember the first part — does this happen to you with movies? — but at some point your memory gets in the groove and you remember the rest well.  Also the palette.

The highlight of moviegoing for the day was a Saudi film called The Perfect Candidate.  It is a little stodgy as a movie, in that the scenes are more than a quarter of a second long and there aren’t any CG spaceships the size of Manhattan, but I thought it made a point about political engagement which American liberals seem incapable of comprehending: one can be politically effective without winning an election, and therefore you don’t have to compromise on every last thing and move to the Electable Center.  As it played out in Saudi Arabia, the female candidate did not get beheaded, although she didn’t win, either, and in the end, the road outside her clinic got paved.

(I say “liberals” because the rightists are perfectly aware of how third parties work.  The Tea Party was founded in 2006, did not fret about throwing the 2012 election to Obama by failing to back the moderate Mitt Romney, and elected one of their own four years later.  Ten years from start to the Presidency, and the Republican Party wiped out in the process, leaving only the name.  Interestingly, that’s the same track record as the Republican party itself: started in 1850, elected a president in 1860.)

Sunset found us at a rooftop bar, with prices and quality to match all the view pubs in the world.  After that, to the Wildner, where Johan knows everybody and we are embraced by virtue of his aura.

Friday, August 30

The day begins as always.  Walk downstairs and a couple of hundred meters to the ticket office to see how well their opinions match those on the web, as far as what tickets are available.  Purchase tickets in the course of a half hour of text message consultation with Johan and Dave, who are trying to do the same from the festival site.  Later, go out for coffee and juice.  Today, lunch came first, at CoVino.  CoVino is a nice place but the truly great innovation there is a piece of flatware that functions as a spoon but is actually a small spatula, of the kind you use to scrape out bowls.  These should be in all place settings, worldwide.  The other interesting thing about CoVino is that none of the waiters had tattoos visible on their forearms.  It’s something you don’t not see very often any more.

Afterwards, a spot of orange juice for 5 euros, and a trip to the island where a different policeman wanted to see and not just pat my iPhone and glasses; and then two more policemen near the theater wanted to see my passport.  Yet they ignore the fat external battery, which on television would be a grenade.  

I am starting to think that they have some specific information that somebody who looks like me is planning propaganda of the deed, using something that looks like a cell phone and glasses.  Italy has a history of imprisoning people who look like other people.

I was walking around with a copy of my passport, as the US State Department tells you to do.  But the Carabinieri want to see the original, so I’ll begin carrying that instead.  

The movies we saw were disconcerting, which is what you come for.  Madre was about a mother who lost her young son to a kidnapper, and ten years later, befriended a teenager who was about that age.  Electric Swan was all symbolist, concerning a skyscraper in Buenos Aires where the bad luck drips from the top story down to the basement and the tremors transmit up to the penthouse.

Afterwards, we ended up at the Ristorante Wildner, near St. Mark’s square, same as last night.  All these people know Johan, because he spends a lot more time in Venice and is much more friendly.  But they didn’t pull down their pants for him, as at Corner Pub.

Saturday, August 31

I left the waiting line before I got to the ticket office because Dave was able to buy tickets for what we wanted, on line.  There must be a better way to allocate theater seats.

The first art Activity today was going to see the beach opera at the Lithuanian Pavilion.  This involved standing nearly two hours in line.  There were two girls behind us, writing post cards as they waited.  I felt I had missed an opportunity.  There was also a really cute line jumper I was too shy to chat up.

Lithuania’s representatives at the Biennale had taken a military warehouse, paved it with beach sand, laid out blankets, and got singers in beachwear to emote, while the audience looked down from a mezzanine that surrounds the beach on all sides.  As with all operas, you couldn’t really understand what was going on without carefully consulting the libretto, which detracts from the Experience.  It had something to do with Global Warming and Ecological Destruction.  The show played continuously in a cycle.  The guard at the door said the average person stayed 20 minutes, and when he left, the next person could come in.  We selfishly stayed the whole one hour duration.  It was quite interesting.

After, we went back toward St. Mark’s to find our way to evening films.  I say “toward”: the space-time of San Marco is well defined, but it is unlike the curved space that you find around Black Holes and the like.  As you approach San Marco, you slow down, even in your coordinates.  Therefore, by the Principle of Least Time, if you want to go to a place behind the square relative to where you are, you pick a path that refracts northward, away from the square, not all the way to Fondamente Nove obviously, because also you have to realize that Rialto has a similar repulsion of nearly the strength of San Marco.  If you aim first (coming from the Armory) to the Acqua Alta bookstore, and then thread the needle half-and-half between the Grand Canal and the Piazza, you should get to La Fenice in less time than if you went straight.  The geodesic is more sensible toward Accademia.  Tourists fall off even faster than 1/r² — they can’t wait to get back to their staterooms and happy hour and blog that they’ve done Venice.

Venice street scenes

Outside the North Macedonia pavilion, a teenage boy with suitcases said to his dad: “Is this even the street?” “A question you will be asking much,” I said. They both laughed after they realized I was speaking to them.

Three more movies:

  • No One Left Behind:  American GIs go to Mexico to bury their fellow soldier who had been deported after his service, and then killed himself.
  • You Will Die At Twenty:  a film from Sudan about a boy who, during his naming ceremony, the holy man pronounces will die at age 20.  He didn’t, but everyone sure expected him to.  This movie was filmed in the director’s father’s village.  The ritual that kicks off the story really does happen.  Gosh there are a lot of ways to be stupid and if you don’t travel, you’ll only see the ones that happen on television.
  • Adults in the Room:  a film by Costa-Gavras “dramatizing” the efforts by Yanis Varoufakis to work out a sustainable resolution to the Greek Debt Crisis with the European banks, and their resolute refusal to allow that.  This was a Guardian “Opinion” piece that should not have been a movie. Except for the final dance number, there was nothing that couldn’t have been conveyed in an SMS with emojis.  Everything explained three times at fourth grade level.  Remember the black and white 16mm educational films in fifth grade, in which everyone spoke in complete sentences lifted from 19th century biographies?

The movies came so close together we had to eat at the festival bars, 66 euros for salad and sandwich.

Sunday, September 1

Today was our first exhausting day at the Biennale itself.  We went to Arsenale.  It was also like reading the Guardian.  Bad news from every country, a few cockamamie ideas, and absolutely nothing designed to make you feel good in any part of your perception.  The notes I wrote on my iPhone that day included, “Can’t spell art without Arduino”, and, “Christian Bendayán is the Peruvian artist who did Indios antropófagos.”  Christian Bendayán is a hoot.  Google him.  He mixes up the old Anthropology Racism with the New Anthropology Racism and a decent amount of skin, too, not all of which you want to see, of course.  If you want to see all the skin you’re seeing, it’s just porn.

Fake fruit (ceramic).

Monday, September 2

This was Giardini day, the other oppressively large venue for the Biennale.  It is divided into permanent country pavilions.  Don’t know what happens there on the off years.  Probably weddings.

I ended up disagreeing with Johan about the Denmark exhibit.  It was a black sphere that somehow managed to look like a disk from any angle you saw it.  I am OK with single-concept gags.  But I think Johan got distracted by an impenetrable video which turned him off to the whole exhibit, and some dictum to the effect that the sphere “represents the accumulation of memories, traumas, and stories” well, whatever, if you’re going to read descriptions of art you’re never going to enjoy anything.

Japan was cute, too, a bunch of imaginary imaginary stories written about tsunami boulders, which are evidently a real thing.  Although, there comes a point, and it arrives early on, when mocking yourself is perceived as a way of bragging that you are important enough to mock.

Burning Man has so much better artists than the Biennale.  They actually build art, instead of building explanations of why they didn’t build art.

Fake coral (beads).

Branzino and duck ragout for dinner.

Tuesday, September 3

This was the day we saw Painted Bird.  It is a slasher film with only one victim — real “Mr. Bill” territory.  It’s clearly set in the Holocaust, except fictionalized, so that Jerzy Kosinski never had to do fact checking on dates and troop movements and the like.  He also stole most of it, I learned upon doing later research.  That doesn’t bother me.  History should be plagiarized — the alternative is making it up.  As usual, the critics are more upset that an adult woman had sex with a young boy (I think that’s what happened) than that a crazy guy gouged out somebody’s eyes for looking at his wife.  I can’t make sense of human morality.

Before that, there was a documentary about an organization that Tim Robbins supports, which teaches acting to convicts.  It’s a good thing he does.  People let themselves be far too ignorant about what goes on in prisons, and prisons are ten times as big a part of this country as Silicon Valley (2.3 million prisoners, 225,000 tech bros in the South Bay).  (That wasn’t in the movie, that is the Internet talking as I write this.)  It’s much better that people coming out of prison have the skills required to get jobs as con men, rather than just bopping people on the head.  The movie is called 45 Seconds of Laughter and refers to a warming up exercise, laughing.  I suppose the concentration camp guards had stretching exercises as well.

Wednesday, September 4

A couple of forgettable pavilions and then two excellent movies, where “excellent” means “really hot but not intimidatingly so actors who take off their shirts from time to time.”  Moffie is a sweet film about a closeted gay South African white boy doing his military service killing black people.  Kai Luke Brummer, the lead actor, was there after the presentation, making the same shy gestures as he did in the movie.  I asked him afterwards if he was consciously staying in character for the Q & A and he said, no, South Africans are just this way.  When not torturing ANC sympathizers.  Or, who knows, maybe even then.  It is really accepted now, to have characters with Asperger’s syndrome or nearly so, which takes quite a load off the performers, not having to find a place to breathe in the middle of a mad Tarantino rage.

Babyteeth is another movie I think you all ought to see, if you are trying to get the taste out of your mouth from movies where dying young people get prettier and wanner as their life is snatched from their pale grip.  The gal here is dying, all right, but she is doing enough other stuff that her parents have time to worry about some other aspect of her life than that she is dying. 

The third movie of the day was Saturday Fiction which had the usual play within a play, alternate history, is any of this true? going on.  It rains more than Blade Runner.  The Internet has made us lazy viewers, I fear.  You really want all the characters to be clickable.

Thursday, September 5

We awoke to no electric power.  Christina came knocking on the door shortly after.  Told us to unplug everything.  She had telephoned someone.  It became gradually apparent, that the power would not return that day, so, when we got back from all the movie and dinner activities, Christina had found us a different place to stay — not far, but the usual degree of Venetian confusing.  This other place was about the size of our house, all in the highest end beige, and with fixtures that shattered when you nudged them off their delicate perches.  I assume.  Anyway, we swept up and went to bed.

There were movies, too.  Borotmokmedi, The Criminal Man was about Georgia, which is the next spot on our travels, so obviously I wanted to see that one, although our specific plans do not include incomprehensible murder.  The description of the film made it sound a bit like that James Thurber story where a man mistaken for a gangster gradually turns into one.  It wasn’t like that, although Thurber is darker than the Walter Mitty image projects.

There was a shorts program, too.  One of the more motionless ones was titled After Two Hours, Ten Minutes Had Passed.  It attempts to convey the tedium of a juvenile detention facility.

For a change from Venetian fare, go to Africa Experience.  The decor is over the top without being embarrassing (no to Nubian nudes with spears, yes to chandeliers made from drums) and the food and especially the staff are top notch.  We had the “chef’s selection” and Guinean beef peanut stew with herb flavored rice, and couscous with another beef preparation.  All excellent.  Apparently their workers are all refugees from different places, which is how they can get a whole continent packed into a walk-in closet in Dorsoduro.  The service is as good as any.  Only two working the front room but there weren’t more than a half dozen tables.  I recommend you go there.  Or to Africa.  There are a lot of connections through Rome to different African cities, especially via Dubai and Addis Ababa.  But you can’t go to Corner Pub afterwards.

I’m probably not doing a favor by reviewing Corner Pub.  They have enough customers already, and their customers are having more fun than you, because they are doing a semester abroad at the Guggenheim nearby and this is their first experience drinking legally — and in the street, no less.  Really, don’t bother them.  Go somewhere else.  Johan’s favorite bartenders have gone on to other things.  The new ones are a little subdued.  The main guy is still there.  I can’t imagine how he maintains his cheer through the whole evening.

Friday, September 6

We were invited back to our originally scheduled room at 11 AM — the power had returned.

The Biennale has many pavilions scattered all around Venice, it’s a great opportunity to see parts of the city you wouldn’t see otherwise. There are also several other exhibitions happening, including a large one with three venues put on by the European Cultural Center.

More fake coral (plastic).
Fake jewelry (medication).

This was the last day of films, for us.  We saw a lesbian romance with guns, and another set of shorts which ended with two naked guys wrestling in a locker room.  I think it was a music video at heart — they were much friendlier than Viggo Mortensen’s adversaries in Eastern Promises.  Various other sexual minorities were included, such as MILFs and infertile couples.

One last time to the Corner Pub for a final Ramazzotti, but by this time, Johan had a new crush, who worked at the seasonal bar “Al Leone D’Oro” across from the Palazzo.  Johan manages to get contact information (in terms of where he’ll be working in the non-festival months) without ever asking for anything as tacky as a phone or email.

Saturday, September 7

The day you leave a place, you see almost as much as the day you arrive.  The flocks of Brown Squall-class boats, that will be missing from your life at least until Clear Lake, if not the next time you see Venice; the tourists from all parts of Midwestern America, in all sizes from overweight to morbidly obese.  The pavilions, some of which have free post cards.

The Biennale attracts a lot of non-Biennale artists whose art falls between that of the perpetual little glass shops and that in the National pavilions.  Some of it is even offensive enough that you wouldn’t have it in your house.  The artist’s statements are funnier.  “I, Barbro Raen Thomassen, am a visual artist and woman.  I am not on facebook and I have no mobile phone.  Pray for me.”  This is superior to anything generated by the bot at https://www.artybollocks.com/generator.html because it is more personal.

We had average cicchetti at lunch time, and then came upon, by accident, “Vino Vero”, a cafe highly recommended, so we had to do it all over again.  Vino Vero is out of the way, north from Rialto and you would only pass by there if you were going to catch a vaporetto around the island back to San Marco.  But you should make the effort.

We grabbed our luggage and walked to catch the boat to the airport.  We took a 3:20 boat for a 7pm flight — air travel!