In Venice there is a small bridge leading over a side canal. Halfway up the steps crossing this bridge there is a landing, and a little cafe has found its perch there. In front of this cafe there is one table with two chairs. If you chose the chair with its back to the cafe, you can overlook the steps you climbed and also the steps leading toward you from the canal path, or rivetta, ahead of you. This is a quiet neighborhood crossroads, a good place to sit with a cup of cappuccino and the newspaper you got from the newsstand behind Piazza San Marco.
Of course you must have a newspaper, a book, a sketchpad--anything that seems to absorb you. If you are simply sitting there, you will appear to be a Lonely Person and people will look away from you. If you seem preoccupied, you can observe them more closely. In any event, I do not sit there for the purpose of people-watching.
The Holly Bush, Holly Mount, Hampstead. Choose the corner next to the fire.
No, I am engaged in Being By Myself in a City Where No One Knows Who I Am and No One I Know Knows Where to Find Me. I have such places in many cities. London, of course. Paris. Rome. Stockholm. Edinburgh. Cape Town. Cannes.
I have another private place in Venice. At the end of my school year at the University of Cape Town, in January, I sailed on the Lloyd Tristino Europa up the east coast of Africa, and arrived in Venice for the first time a little after dawn, standing at the bow, the fog so thick San Giorgio Maggiore seemed to float in the clouds. That night I wandered into a little bar behind Piazza San Marco, and was greeted by the exuberant owner, a young man whose wife was minding their son in a corner.This was a local place. Lino, for that was his name, knew the name of everybody who came in. He hurried around the bar and, without asking, deposited a plate of oysters in front of me. They were alive and began to click. I had never eaten a raw oyster. It was the wise Jonathan Swift who told a friend: "It was a brave man who first ate an oyster." I opened the oysters and ate them. Then Lino brought a plate of French-fried onion rings. I dug in. They were curiously chewy. Lino walked to a seafood chart on the wall, and pointed cheerfully to a squid.
Trattoria alla Rivetta: Try the fritto misto
I returned to Lino's of course every time I came to Venice. Once a man who ran a tourist gimcrack shop on the other side of the square personally cooked everyone gnocchi. No charge. Lino always recognized me, or made signs indicating he did. I went once with my friend John McHugh, a large Irishman. Every subsequent time, Lino used his hands to indicate a man of Falstaffian dimensions and we would agree on my friend's name: "Giovanni."
One year I returned and there was no Lino. I asked inside: "Lino?" I was pointed around the corner to the Trattoria alla Rivetta, with canal steps passing its front window. Lino had moved up in the world to a restaurant with a back room. I walked in. Giovanni! Giovanni! He used sign language for Santa Claus. During the 1972 Venice Film Festival, I took everyone I knew there: Dusan Makavejev, Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson, Thomas Quinn Curtis. Sometimes I would sit alone in the back room and read a book through dinner. Lino and I had only one word in common, but we always remembered it.
On our honeymoon, of course, Chaz and I visited Lino's. I waited for Lino to say "Giovanni!" He did. Chaz was surprised: "He actually does remember John!" More than 30 years had passed. In 2004, we took the family to Venice. I looked in at Lino's in the afternoon. There was no Lino. His son, now nearing 40, explained: "Lino, he a little retired. Here only in morning." The next morning I walked over to the Piazza and looked in through the window. All the lights were off except those in the kitchen. Lino, now bald and grey, was kneading pasta. I could have knocked on the glass and had his attention, but I didn't. We weren't that kind of friends.
In Two Weeks in the Midday Sun, my book about the Cannes Film Festival, I wrote that I always wake up very early on the morning after I arrive, because of jet lag. I leave Chaz sleeping in our room at the Hotel Splendid, and walk down the rue Felix-Faure, passing the flower sellers setting out their bouquets, the fish-mongers unloading iced oysters, and the street-cleaners hosing down the pavement. I walk through the market, inhale the melons and the roses, and buy the International Herald-Tribune. I turn down the hill toward the old harbor, and at a particular cafe, at a particular table on the sidewalk, I order, in shameful French, a cafe au lait, a Perrier, and a croissant.
On a morning walk in Cannes. The market is on the right. (Ebert)
This is such a sacred ritual that one year I looked up and saw Jeannette Hereniko, the founder of the Hawaii Film Festival, approaching me from the direction of the bus stop. She was in a bit of a crisis. It was 6 a.m., the airline had lost her carry-on bag, and she had no idea of the name of her hotel. She had been reading my book on the flight over, and decided to see if she could find me at that cafe. Of course she could. I didn't know where she was staying, either, but we had another cup of coffee.
Of all the words I have written, a brief passage in that out-of-print book is the one most often mentioned to me. People tell me they know exactly what I'm describing. Here it is. It takes place on the other end of town from the old harbor:
I walked out of the Martinez and was made uneasy again by the wind. So I turned inland, away from the Croisette and the beach, and walked up into one of the ordinary commercial streets of Cannes. I cut behind the Carlton, walked past the Hotel Savoy, and before long was at the little fruit and vegetable marketplace, at the other end of town from the big market. I took a table at a cafe, ordered an espresso and a Perrier, and began to sketch.
Suddenly I was filled with an enormous happiness, such a feeling as comes only once or twice a year, and focused all my attention inward on the most momentous feeling of joy, on the sense that in this moment everything is in harmony. I sat very still. I was alone at a table in a square where no one I knew was likely to come, in a land where I did not speak the language, in a place where, for the moment, I could not be found. I was like a spirit returned from another world. All the people around me carried on their lives, sold their strawberries and called for their children, and my presence there made not the slightest difference to them. I was invisible. I would leave no track in this square, except for the few francs I would give to the cafe owner, who would throw them in a dish with hundreds of other coins.
San Giorgio Maggiore in the morning fog.
After a time, the intensity of my feelings passed, and I sat absolutely still at the table, a blank, taking in the movements before me. There are times when I think it would be possible to lead my whole life like this, a stranger in a foreign land, sitting in a cafe, drinking espresso, sketching on a pad, sometimes buying a newspaper which would tell me in my own language what was happening in other places to other people. I would see myself in the third person--that anonymous figure in the distance, crossing under the trees. Most of the time I am too busy to entertain such reflections. Indeed, I have filled my life so completely with commitments and deadlines that many days there is no time to think at all about the fact that I am living it. Bur these still moments, usually in foreign country or a strange city, give me the illusion that all of my life is as distant from me as the lives of the people in the marketplace, and that in some sense the person that is really me sits somewhere quietly at a table, watching it all go by.Yes, I've been back to the cafe several times again, always hoping for the same seat at the same table. Such returns are an important ritual to me. Chaz says it is impossible to get me to do anything the first time, and then impossible to stop me from doing it over and over again. After we were married, we went to Europe on our honeymoon.
"What did you visit?" her best friend Carolyn asked her."We visited Roger's previous visits," she said.
I confess it is true. "I always go to Sir John Soane's house," I would tell Chaz. And, "this is my favorite Wren church." And, "this is the oldest restaurant in London. I always order cockaleekie soup, toad in the hole, banger and mashed, and, to follow, Spotted Dick."
Chaz studied the menu and told the waiter she would have the lamb chops. "Excellent choice, madam," he said, giving me a look that I think translated as, I remember you, all right.
My new bride was also made to take a particular train from the Liverpool Street Station to Cambridge, and accompany me on a walk along the Cam to the village of Grantchester to visit the Rupert Brooke memorial and have lunch at the Green Man. And of course we had to walk slowly past the Old Vicarage, as I recited:
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?And we had to ascertain that the Church clock indeed still stood at ten to three, the irrefutable evidence cited by generations of Cambridge students who protested it was not yet Closing Time.
I may to the onlooker appear to suffer from some sort of compulsive repetition syndrome, but in fact I am engaged in a personal ritual. I have many sacred places, where I sit and think, "I have been here before, I am here now, and I will be here again." Sometimes, lost in reverie, I remember myself approaching across the same green, or down the same footpath, in 1962, or 1983, or many other times.
In January 1966, I stopped in London on my way home from the University of Cape Town, and found that my friend and mentor, Daniel Curley, was living there with his family on a sabbatical leave. Dan was a lifelong London walker. As the professor teaching me on the first hour of the first day of my first year at Illinois, in English 101, he had struck me as a man admirable in every way. He was a novelist and short story writer, he read, he taught, he edited a famous little magazine, and it appeared he ordered his clothes from the Sears catalog. He invariably wore stout walking shoes, corduroy trousers, a tweed sports coat and, in winter, an Irish cable knit sweater. He carried a knapsack with binoculars and his Peterson's bird guide.
Now, so dressed, he met me at the Belsize Park tube stop and took me on a walk past Keats's Cottage, up to the top of Parliament Hill, across the Heath to the Spaniard's Inn for lunch, then to Kenwood House, then on the 210 bus to Highgate Village, then through Highgate Cemetery and the graves of Karl Marx, George Eliot and Radclyffe Hall, and then down to the Archway tube stop, pausing to pet the bronze of Dick Whittington's Cat.
Lino: Happy to see me, but waiting for Giovanni!
I have taken this walk at least 50 times. Chaz has taken it five or six times, and says she wants to take it again: "No, really." No friend of mine in London, or visiting London, has failed to be taken along on this walk. There is even a book about it, The Perfect London Walk, written by Dan and myself, with photographs by my friend Jack Lane. The British edition was published by the Catto Press on Heath Street. We took the publisher's advance for the book and spent it to pay for our trips, and the trips of some pals who were needed, you see, as our advisors on the walk.
I am often accompanied on my ritual visits, but just as often I go alone. Sometimes Chaz will say she's going shopping, or visiting a friend, or just staying in the room and reading in bed. "Why don't you go and touch your bases?" she'll ask me. I know she sympathizes. These secret visits are a way for me to measure the wheel of the years and my passage through life. It is not that I do not love my wife or my friends, and want to be with them. It is that sometimes on this amazing voyage through life we need to sit on the deck and regard the waves.
I first visited the Moscow Arms near Pembridge Square in 1970, when the room fee at the hotel now named the Blue Bells was £4 a night. I have never met anybody in that pub. I always sit in the same corner booth. There is a man who comes in every lunchtime, tattooed, bald, and wearing a motorcycle jacket. He is nearly 40 years older now, but he is still there, and it looks like it's still the same jacket. Has he noticed me crossing his field of vision 50 or 75 times in his lifetime? Certainly not. But if he still comes at lunchtime every day, it is my duty to bear witness, because by now I have become the only person in the Moscow Arms who knows how long he has been doing this, or cares. I believe this includes him.
Keats House: He heard the nightingale sing here, but the tree is different. (Ebert)
I always visit a used book store, Keith Fawkes, in Flask Walk, Hampstead. I've found many precious books there. Then I go to the Holly Bush pub, up Heath Street to Holly Mount, where there are snug corners to ensconce myself. A corner is important. It provides privacy and an anchor and lets you exist independently of the room. It was while walking down from the Holly Bush that I first saw the Catto Gallery and made my best friends in London. There is a pub down the hill in the opposite direction I have been visiting so long that I even happen to know Helena Bonham Carter once lived upstairs, and that she has since moved. Did I ever ring her bell? Certainly not.In the years when I was drinking, I drank in these places. I haven't had a drink for 30 years, and I still visit them with the same enjoyment--actually more. The thing about a British pub is that you don't have to drink booze. If you don't, nobody looks at you funny. They provide tea, coffee, lunch, atmosphere, a place to sit, a time to think. At the Holly Bush I always have the Ploughman's lunch with an extra pickle
But let me stop place-dropping. These places do not involve only a visit, but a meditation: I have been here before, I am here now, I will be here again. Robert Altman told me he kept track of time not by the years, but by the films he was working on. "I'm always preparing the next film," he said. That is living in a time outside time. Of course everyone's time must run out. But not yet. Not until I'm finished touching a few more bases. I will sit in the corner by the fire in the Holly Bush again, and stand in the wind on top Parliament Hill, and I know exactly how to find that cafe in Venice, although I could never describe the way. Oh, yes I do.
¶
A virtual tour of Keith Fawkes' used book store in Hampstead can be found here.
¶
"The Old Vicarage, Grantchester," by Rupert Brooke, read by Eleanor Bron:
aarrghhhh you're making me jealous, I would love to visit Venice. Instead, I am tragically stuck here in the midwest, where it is freezing cold, drab, and dreadful... le sigh.
I hope Venice hasn't been charred badly from the massive flooding a few months ago. your book sounds wonderful, by the way.
Ebert: It has been flooding in Venice for a long time, a melancholy reminder that the city always seems to be dying.
The first time I sailed into Venice it was cold, dark, wet, foggy, uncrowded, and. indescribably romantic. Winter is my preferred season there. Desertion becomes it. Wear waterproof shoes and your Tilly hat, and carry a brolly. There is always a cafe, a church, a bookshop, to duck into. I love to sit inside in a place close to the rain, so close I can reach out a hand to feel it, or hear it falling against the window. If you feel lonely at such times in such places, you have the consolation of knowing you are intended to. You can regard yourself with tenderness, order a cup of cappucino, and enfold yourself in The Wings of the Dove.
This entry was its own meditation for me. Naturally, it's reminded me of walks I've taken in foreign lands. Strangely, the closest one is my fondest so far: Quebec City. You couldn't have written this at a better time for me to read it. If ever I direct a movie, you've given me an excellent way to show the passage of time for a character (and you'd be given a special thanks in the credits, of course). Thank you.
They say wisdom comes with age, but sometimes age comes alone. You have a traveling companion, Roger.
Roger,
We all have rituals. You have caused me to resolve to make mine more interesting.
Eric
Very beautiful.
I don’t have the breadth of your experience. I haven’t been the places you’ve been but I understand what you are talking about.
Sometimes you need your patches of solitude, they evoke memories of the great mile markers of your life. You hope to recapture the magic of first discovering them. They put a timestamp on your life as you remember the moments when you returned there and what was happening in your life at the time.
There is a tiny seafood restaurant in Florida that sits on a hill. It has a patio out back that sometimes crowds with people late in the day to watch the sunset. The patio overlooks the beach on the left and a small cemetery in the distance on the right. That may sound morbid to some but for me it is a place with the kind of beauty no artist can capture, not poet could put into words. I know every inch of that place, I can smell the air as I write this. I can hear the creaking boards under my feet, the breeze on my face. It is the kind of place where you half expect to look up and see Mr. Hulot looking over the railing.
This was the place where I read Moby Dick for the third time during my summer break when I was in college. I sat outside on the patio in a lawn chair with my legs crossed and fell into a hole in the story, yet my sense of sound and of smell were taking in my surroundings. I could hear the ocean and I could smell the sea air and I remember that the sea air was interrupted by the smell of boiled crawfish.
I’ve been there at least five times since. Several years ago, I went with my girlfriend. I did not tell her that I had been here before, told her nothing about my experience. I did not tell her this but this was sort of an audition. If she found it as magical as I did, then I knew this was the woman for me. When she arrived at my little place in the world she said nothing for a very long time. She just gazed out at the water, up at the sky and then over toward the cemetery. “I could stay here all day, this is beautiful” she finally said. We got married a year later.
Ebert: And you will return.
Is that virtual reality picture thing merely one aisle of the used bookstore in Hampstead? I've been to plenty of used book stores, and I've never seen an aisle that crammed with books. Not at the Strand, not at King Books in Detroit, not even at some store in Tennessee that had two whole shelves of Tom Swift and another four of Louis L'amour.
I've yet to travel extensively, but I think my favorite used bookstore is Jane Addams in Urbana, if only because the top floor creaks like an old house and the different rooms are themed.
The rest of the post has me very sad that my planned six month stay in Europe fell apart over Thanksgiving. Jealous is a word that only goes so far right now.
Ebert: There are other aisles, every bit as crammed. I too love the Jane Addams bookstore.
This is a wonderful slice of what I look for when traveling, or even in my own home town. Being able to sit down somewhere, anywhere, and feel the wheels of the Universe turning slowly around you. A little bit of quiet, a little dose of invisibility, a little dab of wistfulness, and a lot of contented sighs.
Roger -
I grew up in Chicago and have been reading your reviews since you started at the Times. Lately your writing has taken on the tone of a valedictory. Thought I'd just write a quick note to let you know how much I love your prose. Thank you.
Dennis
"At the side of the everlasting why, is a yes, and a yes, and a yes."
I had a boyfriend once who, after I left for university, went to visit all of our favorite places in turn to feel closer to me. Life is a gift, sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet.
That sounds pleasant. And that photograph with Lino is particularly nice.
I would describe some things around me but they're not entirely fascinating.
I love such places...
Roger, thanks for expressing so well a feeling I've had in a few special places. Sometimes it's a peaceful warm glow, and sometimes that "sweet pain" in the chest.
"Be ye lamps unto yourselves, be a refuge to yourselves. Hold fast to Truth as a lamp; hold fast to the Truth as a refuge. Look not for a refuge in anyone beside yourselves. And those, who shall be a lamp unto themselves, shall betake themselves to no external refuge, but holding fast to the Truth as their lamp, and holding fast to the Truth as their refuge, they shall reach the topmost height." - Buddha (563 - 483 BC)
Kant is said to have rarely if at all travelled away from his home town. Correct me but I understand Jesus, Moses and the Prophet isolated themselves for specific periods. So did Gandhi at the threshhold of major political decisions. Scientists get "lost" in their problems.
Of Leonardo
"Leonardo wrote : "You will so exert yourself in youth"; "Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind"; "Death rather than weariness"; "No labor suffices to tire me." He was a person of extraordinary energy and perseverance.
While painting "The Last Supper," Leonardo would sometimes work from dawn to midnight without stopping to eat or drink. Then for three or four days he would not touch the painting, pacing the floor, utterly lost in thought. In spite of this amazing concentration, this all-consuming devotion to the act of creation, Leonardo completed relatively few of his works. Most of his paintings, though painstakingly planned and sketched, remain incomplete."
Daisaku Ikeda, "Leonardo's Universal Vision and the Parliament of Humanity" (University of Bologna, 1994
I am sure Mr. Ebert's dedication to cinema and his seemingly furious literary activity are havens of repose like the often revisited corners he has so nostalgically sketched.
That was quite an enchanting piece of writing, Mr. Ebert. I know that feeling all too well, without ever realising I did before. I have a sudden urge to go and touch my bases.
If by dull rhymes our English must be chain'd,
And, like Andromeda, the Sonnet sweet
Fetter'd, in spite of pained loveliness;
Let us find out, if we must be constrain'd,
Sandals more interwoven and complete
To fit the naked foot of poesy;
Let us inspect the lyre, and weigh the stress
Of every chord, and see what may be gain'd
By ear industrious, and attention meet:
Misers of sound and syllable, no less
Than Midas of his coinage, let us be
Jealous of dead leaves in the bay wreath crown;
So, if we may not let the Muse be free,
She will be bound with garlands of her own.
It's always a delight to read about your particular muses. This was an exceptional essay.
I can completely relate to how you feel. I do the exact same thing when I travel. These meaningful places make me very happy.
And when you said:
" Then Lino brought a plate of French-friend onion rings. I dug in. They were curiously chewy. Lino walked to a seafood chart on the wall, and pointed cheerfully to a squid." -- That's exactly what I experienced on my first trip to Spain! :)
I recall there being a Kieslowski review containing these sorts of thoughts. Certainly his films are about these things. Thanks for this. Any "bases" in Toronto?
Ebert: Steven Temple books on Queen Street. I think he has read every book on the shelves. The Coffee Mill in Yorkville, where Dusty Cohl met his friends almost every day. The street car ride to the beach. Chinatown and the Kensington Market.
You are certainly not alone in visiting some of these secret places; I've taken your Perfect London Walk - or to give it its correct title, Curley's Walk - twice now and I will take it again. It was a glimpse a London I didn't really know; the second time, when I took my brother - who lives in London - he commented as we approached The Spaniards 'if it weren't for the traffic, you wouldn't know we were still in London.' And yet even the cars still manage to manoeuver through that curious little bottleneck in the road without aid of traffic lights.
The first time I was alone, the second time with my brother. Both times Keats' house was closed for refurbishment or whatever; it should definitely, the website tells me, reopen this year. The latter time I was able to point out all sorts of literary and historical points of interest, thanks to your book. 'Here is where Keats probably met Coleridge; here Queen Boadicea is said to be buried; this is where George Orwell worked and lived.' As we approached Kenwood House, Michael Palin passed up with a smile, out for a jog on the Heath.
It occurred to me that people pass such things every day without thinking of them (fewer pass Michael Palin, but you know what I mean), and that the only way really to know a city is by foot. Some people don't even know their own cities this way, and often tourists in London will find themselves using the tube for everything, descending the escalators and popping up again outside whichever museum or theatre or cinema they are after. But a city like London - or my own, Edinburgh - is full of curious little oddities tucked away, off, as they say, the beaten track. For instance, the rather confusing map you get handed at the new part of Highgate Cemetery will lead most people to George Eliot's grave without too much difficulty; but how many will discreetly climb over it (feeling just a pang of disrespect) to discover George Lewes, behind her, hidden from view?
Ebert: As he was in life.
I've been twice in Edinburgh for the festival, and another time in January, when it was very cold. I went to a performance of five short plays by Beckett, held in a chilly lecture hall in the medical school of the University. A faint aroma of formaldehyde. Perfect.
You bring to mind this quote from Emerson:
"It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)
Also brings to mind one of my favorite of your observations; and the reason so many readers will identify with this post: "The more specific, the more universal." This applies to great cinema, literature, music lyrics, and essays on blogs as well.
I too remember where I've been. But in Cranford, NJ, as many places in America, those places aren't there any more. Ploughed under or over; only the memories remain. We can walk by the rivers or along the streets whre the old houses were but the shops are long gone and only the Gaps are there to replace them. Or the Old Navys where the Corner Sweet Shops were.
If you (or anyone) happen to be bumming around Paris at some point and looking for some odd entertainment, check out the Musée de la Contrefaçon. It's a little museum dedicated to the art of counterfeiting. It's not just stuff you'd want to counterfeit, but all manner of consumer goods. It helps if you're fluent because you may have to bang on the door and beg the proprietor to open up during posted business hours. You may need to argue the point that you are in fact there during the posted business hours.
Roger,
Nice blog entry. I was fortunate enough - after years of waiting - to visit Venice, Rome and Florence in 2007. Venice is one of the most unique cities I have ever seen and far surpassed any expectations I had for it. It's wonderful to lose yourself in such a place. I'm planning on making Prague my next stop.
To go completely off topic, I just recently saw Carlos Reygadas' "Silent Light." Have you seen it yet? I'm curious to hear your opinion. I thought it was incredible.
Just beautiful. In my book, there's no richer experience than purposely losing yourself in one of the great cities. During my only trip to Venice, I closed down a secluded bar and walked through Piazza San Marco to my hotel. It was about 2 AM, and I realized that, for a few brief snippets of time, I was the only person there. So I sat right down in the pigeon poop in the middle of the piazza and marveled at the most grandiose solitude I'd ever known.
Now ask yourself -- would it have been possible for you to experience those places in that way had you been carrying a cellphone in your pocket?
Ebert: Cellphones and solitude are mortal enemies.
Dear ER,
This article of yours instantly reminds me of the famous two lines : "Miles to go before I sleep... miles to go". Your essay is a poetry in itself.
In Kolkata, the Indian Coffee House is one nostalgic place, where "silence" is denied admission, yet one could sit for hours with a cup of infusion, undisturbed, unperturbed by the surrounding cacophony, yet could focus on one of the new poems he writes at those moments. (in 60's and 70's)
Haven't been there of late. While I can still hear the cacophony from outside taking a walk along the "College Street" (still the best book market, old & new, in India) I believe, but do not know if the poems are still taking births inside.
Yours fondly,
sanjoy
Ebert: Sanjoy! Always nice to hear from you! Readers: Sanjoy is my great friend who was program director of the Kolkata Film Festival when I was there.
This post reminds me of films of "Keislowski" and "Before Sunrise & Sunset"
I'm fortunate to live near the bottom of Parliament Hill, and have taken the walk up to Kenwood House many times. Nothing can beat the first pass through the building and coming face to face with a Rembrandt self portrait with no knowledge that it is just around the next corner. The thing I most enjoy is cycling round the city and catching sight of the blue plaques. They are everywhere. On one remarkable ride I passed the home of George Orwell (just near the top of Parliament Hill), Charles Dickens (Highgate), Dylan Thomas (Camden), even a little spot marked as the place where Mozart composed some sonata or other (Chelsea - it was a long ride). Very humbling.
Ebert: I envy you. And of course there's that pizzeria not far from Hampstead train station where Orwell worked in the bookshop that inspired Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Around 1970 it was a coffee bar where I played chess. And Julian Huxley lived in a house just up the hill from the pizzeria. And Coleridge is buried under the central aisle of the church overlooking Highgate Cemetery. London is the most endlessly fascinating city I know. I'm almost glad I've never lived there, because I'd never want to get used to it.
Beautiful entry. I haven't been to any of those countries you mentioned, but your words have brought me closer to them than I ever could have felt before.
Any bases in Belgium?
Ebert: Just literary bases. Nicholas Freeling...
I understand the desire to return, to revisit the places you've already visited. There's a beach on the island of Virgin Gorda where I was injured and almost drowned. Returning there years later was like visiting a scene from a dream.
I've occasionally gotten frustrated with people I've traveled with for their reluctance to re-visit a destination. "You've already seen it!" I know: that's just the point.
Your writing has meant so much to me over the past several years and I really enjoyed reading your latest entry today. I could not help but think of the last stanza of "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" by Wordsworth:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
Thank you for your perspective and your words.
How lovely! Thank you, Roger.
One of my first times in Venice, I was about 25, lost in the city, dazed with impressions and high on beauty, it was lunch-time and I came across a young man who was standing on the street, opening the door to a house. He smiled at me and invited me in, for lunch, in Italian. I smiled back and shook my head. He was gloriously beautiful, needless to say. Or another day, early morning, walking just below an open window I heard a man singing inside, real belcanto, unforgetable.
Toronto is (still) a marvellous city, as North American cities go, for discovering on foot. Riding the Queen street car is even better when you get off, walk different stretches, and get back on when tired. Walk along King Street East from Yonge all the way to Parliament and then down to Distillery District. St. Lawrence Market is nearby. On Bloor, starting from Spadina and going west, for many kilometres you will have such diversity of neighbourhoods. And that is only a fraction.
Ebert: I have taken all of those walks and ridden the street car and I agree. No wonder it was Jane Jacob's inspiration.
Ironic that you tell us about enjoying going to places in which nobody knows you while, on a trip to Cambridge (UK) some years ago, I remmeber stopping at a book store and being truly glad to see a familiar face (on the cover of a book) on a foreing land: it was your movie glossary on an edition with a totally different name which I can't remmember. I should have bought it.
On another subject, I share the hope of some of your other readers that someday you will review Apocalypto. Thanks.
Offtopic but just having finished Slumdog and your review, minutes ago. It's a reminder that the real Ebert is there, not here.
What a beautiful film!
It captures something authentically real and quintessential about India----the explosively modern with it's infinite contradictions----the idiom of Bollywood is refined to a new height----its a film by a British director---next to us,who could better know it-----I am sure it sets a new milestone in Indian cinema----as metropolitan in spirit as Taxi Driver----Satyajit Ray is too long ago to be relevant ,he is about a world which passed away----a portrait of the brave new world,essentially true if not completely accurate---the implausibility of the story gives it a kind of extra metaphorical power of truth
You led me ,a reluctant viewer to this film----your reliability is unimpeachable in matters cinematic----in most other things,I would argue---
Ebert: Isn't Ray's "The Big City" another version of working for the Indian equivalent of Wal-Mart?
I fed the birds everwhere I went in Houston--throwing bread out the windows, eventually--and now every single kind of bird wherever I go will come up to me--even eagles, flocks of ducks etc. I plan on flying to another country to Europe one day to talk walks in the country to see if all the different kinds of birds will come and greet me. And I'm confident they will, for reasons I won't understand. I am a 1/4 Apache (just enough to get the benefits), and it is with the animals that I like to reflect with amazement--I look forward to their greetings.
Dear Mr. Roger.
I loved the essay. I loved the flower print shirt even more. Do you still have it?
I havent been to Europe yet, but if i do go, it would be to Corfu first. i read this book by Gerald Durrel "My Family and Other Animals" and since then, Corfu is the place i want to see.
Its not worth one's while to visit many big cities now. I visited Dubai recently and on three consecutive nights i woke up earlier than usual. it couldnt have been jetlag, i live a two hour flight away. then i realised what it was. there were no birds. i couldnt hear any birds. my lawn at home is full of birds early in the morning. i could not sleep because i could not hear them. it felt sterile. no street vendors, no old book stores, no stray cats, no stray dogs, no birds.
Ebert: Technically, it's an Hawaiian shirt. I believe I do. Dubai is an enormous city, consideringthat it seems to exist far from its sources of food.
Ebert: Cellphones and solitude are mortal enemies.
Indeed. And texting! I hate the notion that I should be able to be reached at any time, no matter what. I don't always want to be connected.
Time is strange. External time and internal time. I'm middle-aged but it seems irrelevant. The body and the psyche in different continuums.
Ebert: It is always the same person inside.
You've got me thinking of Roeg's "Don't Look Now," a fabulous but less inviting view of uncanny Venezia. Perhaps Giovanni was a spectral future self, shadowing you around.
I've spent some time in Buenos Aires the last few years. I have always enjoyed my time there, but I have also been fascinated at the rapid cosmopolitanization of different parts of the city. North Americans and Europeans have come in droves, capitalizing on the currency collapse that occurred at the end of 2001.
Processes like these are strange. They obviously cannot eliminate the uniqueness of a city's culture, but they do have an impact on it. I noted how the contemporary art scene seemed to bifurcate into a more hermetic Argentine-only group and a more open set, with foreigners on short stays constantly coming into the picture and sharing ideas. Not surprisingly, the art of both groups was strikingly different.
And then there are the backpackers. Oh god. But you have to start somewhere, I guess.
In any case, I thought about the disappearance of urban specificity a lot watching the film "The Edge of Heaven" (poor translation of the German title "Auf der anderen Seit," which I believe would be closer to "On The Other Side," a title that suggests both the distinction between living and dying and the crossing of international borders). In this film Berlin and Istanbul are in places indistinguishable. It is as though a global monoculture is taking over city centers around the world. That is, of course, until Lotte wanders off the beaten path, into the bottomless pit of poverty that might be harder to find on the Western European side.
When I see people at the airport make one cell phone call after another for an entire hour-long layover, I wonder how many people can even appreciate solitude anymore. What is it about being alone with their thoughts that they are afraid of? I don't want to know.
My wife and I (both fairly well traveled for lower-class Americans) have resolved to revisit our favorite places before going anywhere. Alas, that won't be for a while given the recent developments of a new kid and no job, but eventually we will. Reykjavik and Kyoto are the two we most want to return to. Very inviting places. Your column here is an eloquent reminder that we need to do it.
Ebert: Airports for me are great places for reading.
You say you are "lower class," but I'm not sure that applies to anyone with memories of Kyoto and Reykjavik. One of the things I couldn't believe about Governor Palin was that she had never traveled overseas. I wrote a column about the kinds of people who must travel, because of an insistent curiosity--ones like those Melville imagines standing impatiently at the edge of the land--and got a lot of criticism that I was a liberal elitist. I think the desire to travel is purely human and has nothing to do with politics, and as you have apparently discovered, you find a way to pay for it if you must travel. Having said that, I will add that on my first visit to Europe I took along Frommer's Europe on $5 a Day. That was basically supposed to cover a bed, food and a certain amount of bus and Metro travel, and it just about did. On a later trip to London, I cashed a $20 traveler's check every morning, and in the evening accumulated the leftover cash to buy some presents.
With a baby arriving and unemployment, you are unlikely to see Kyoto soon. I wonder if the Japanese prices are still incredibly high (you'd better have $30 just to eat at McDonald's). But Iceland is now broke, whatever that will mean for tourists.
And now I am in your debt. As a busy mother, a PhD student teaching my first class, one beholden to visit the grandparents, a perpetual do-gooder,and a perpetual mess-maker-- as someone who is frayed and frazzled--reading this entry washed over me like a religious vision. {and if you can believe it my 5 year old just busted through the door with an impish grin and a whoopie cushion behind her back...no kidding...but, what are the chances you will believe me?} Thank you.
Ebert: Somehow, I believe you.
You want a great experience? Pick-up Hemingway's A Moveable Feast and read it in downtown Paris. Or anywhere with a European atmosphere, but Paris is the preferred flavour.
Ebert: Don't you think a Left Bank cafe would be an even better place?
Your experiences mixed with those of your readers; all different but all the same.
The end of the long passage you quoted reminds me of this bit from Whitman's "Song of Myself":
These come to me days and nights and go from me again,
But they are not the Me myself.
Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,
Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,
Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.
I envy you your memories of Venice. I wish I had more. I wish I had the right memories of that city. Not long ago, I read John Berendt’s City of Falling Angels, and the book only made me realize again how much of Venice I’d missed on my first go.
I was in Venice, once - nearly nine years ago, now. Lord, how time passes. I was in college, was spending the spring semester of my junior year abroad, and in early February my fellow Americans and I were taken on one of those ubiquitous “college student” tours of a famous Italian city – which is to say that we spent less than two days in Venice, and saw very little.
Oh, we saw the Piazza San Marco, idled among the pigeons, and took a gander at some of the art; but one cannot really see much of Venice in twenty-four hours, and that city deserves more. It should say something about such whirlwind college trips that my strongest memory of that fabulous city is of our hotel. It was winter, quite cold, and we were saddled with the early morning entrance of an obnoxiously drunk roommate and a malfunctioning radiator that simply spit water. Wonderful, no?
Like you, however, I do have many good memories of Italy, and I too had quiet places that I sought out. One of my favorites was located in a simple city park. I lived in Italy for four months that year, and most of that time was spent in the city of Modena – not well known as a "must see" city, but quiet, and the absence of tourists made it a very good place in which to witness everyday Italian life (I did not envy one friend, who spent two months in Florence, and was never once out of the heavy tourist zone). One of my favorite places was a park bench that was nearly surrounded by trees. It was the city’s largest park, but was not at all huge. It had a running path and a large number of trees, and from this little bench – which was up high on a hill – I could look down and watch the many runners as they made their way past. Not at all glamorous – but it was pretty in spring, and the bench brought one of too those rare moments of peace.
Ebert: Venice has a little park across from the rail station, but the only joggers are cats.
Question - does the theater in which you saw The Third Man for the first time still exist?
Ebert: I'm not sure. Since that was on my first trip to Paris and I found it by accident, I'm not sure where it was.
It's a shame that Tintin never went to Venice - Hergé could have worked wonders with the city. But Indiana Jones went, and I suppose that that's the next best thing.
Ebert: And what was the movie where they had car chases in Venice?
For me, the wonderful thing about returning to places that I've known and loved is measuring how very strange and unsettling, mysterious and rich the nature of time itself seems to be. Time itself seems to overlap and collapse in upon itself.
There's a moment in ROCKY V where Rocky and Adrian are back in the old neighbourhood, broke, standing in front of the fabled pet shop where they fell in love, where Adrian has been forced to reclaim her old job. As the train rumbles overhead, Rocky asks: "Yo, Adrian? Did we ever leave this place?"
Returning to old haunts, that line always echoes in my head.
"Did I ever leave this place? Have all the moments in my life in between my last time here actually existed? Perhaps I have simply spent the space between visits in a half-dream state of limbo, imagining other people and different voyages. Perhaps I've actually been here all along, suspended."
Ebert: For 33 years I spent one week a year in Boulder, and it sometimes seemed I had been at the Conference on World Affairs for eight months in a row.
You're thinking of "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen", a guilty pleasure if ever there was one. But there was only one car.
Ebert: Yeah, and how many streets?
The pleasure of seeing Connery knock heads outweighed (but perhaps didn't excuse) the mind-numbing factual errors of that film. Incidentally, if memory serves, the comic book it was based on opened with a scene featuring a gargantuan 19th-century England-France land bridge terminating at Dover.
I first went to Venice last April, and made a point of standing in front of the church that played a library in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade". While in London, I was thrilled to find 221B on Baker Street. And in the Oxford Botanic Garden, I sat in the very bench featured at the end of "The Amber Spyglass", the third novel of Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials", of which "Northern Lights" (known in the States and through the movie adaptation as "The Golden Compass". When I stood in the Roman Forum, I could almost see the characters of HBO's Rome, both historical and fictional.
Seeing fiction-related sites is a wonderful part of traveling. Like history, it's always there.
I get it.
There's a spot I visit. It's on the plains of Colorado near Denver International Airport. There is nothing particularly remarkable about it, but at night the place is positively seething with a magic I don't think I've known anywhere else.
There is a solitude that exists among the farmer's fields and dirt roads. Everything is quiet. Everything is exactly as it should be, sitting out there in the middle of all the dark on the land and the faint orange light from Denver seeping over the horizon.
The stars are many out there, away from the things of people. One is forced to find himself being too loud, and in order to circumvent any indignity against the great Silent Beauty of the World, quiet down.
I will take it with me when I go.
I would read on the Left Bank, but I find it lacking a little in vintage France and more of a tourism spot (I am referring to Hemingway's A Moveable Feast.)
Now, Spain. Spain I would love to visit, but I feel the authentic part of the bull-fighters (etc) has been lost to the tourism trade. I suppose I could always read about it in Death in the Afternoon but it's just not the same.
So you've been to all these places on film festivals? I want to go to the Toronto Film Festival next year, maybe. What scares me is watching ten movies a day and not being able to think about them properly. I just watched the second episode The Decalogue (Kieslowski) - three days after finally being satisfied that I'd discovered every theme in the first. Looks like this one is also going to take me a while to figure-out too.
Ebert: Toronto is a very good choice. Don't see 10 movies a day! See the ones you feel intrigued by, and then go walking and eat in little Asian restaurants. "Search" this thread for Toronto and find out about Queen St., etc.
In Paris I recall there was an aquarium designed like a movie theatre, called the Cineaqua at Trocadero. You could sit and watch the fish and the sharks overhead to a trip-hop soundtrack. There was even a piano bar, closed when I went there, but filling my imagination with wonders.
Having lived a lovely Parisian lifestyle, if only for a short time, has liberated me to live other lifestyles. Next I plan to live in Papua New Guinea.
Ebert: That will be another life style, all right...
The more you travel I think, the more you find out that the world is not really larger but smaller. We have become so inter-connected with technology and the like that sometimes I feel that people have become desensitized to one another. It seems often, more and more that no matter where you go people are always in such a hurry, eager to get to their next destination or their next thought that they often don't have any time to get to know you.
You can see all the great vistas you like, but I find that a lot of it is nothing but a big shopping mall now (They have Subway in the dry corners of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia). I once ordered a Dominos pizza in Bangcock that had a distinct flavor of the East. It seems that the cultures of the world have survived, its just the commerce of the West that has overtaken it. Or did it start with the East, I don't really know. When I visited Japan, everyone was always walking around, and you can be sure they were on a cell phone. Of course, its all the same now...
I find that there are still places you can go where one can find a bit of solace and content. Today, its easy to become distracted by the traffic of everything tech, but it feels really good just to breath in the scenery as often as possible. I find that helping people and living in their shoes for a bit does that trick just fine. Provided you don't offend anyone.
About airports, they can be distracting and fun at the same time. Some of the most interesting people I've ever met were going through them. Once in an Airport on my way back from Germany my flight was cancelled and the airline wouldn't re-imburse my ticket. I don't recall the exact circumstances for why I was so delayed, I just remember that it wasn't so simple that I could just get on another flight right away. I stayed overnight in the airport for about two days, without enough for a hotel room. I snuck up in the observation tower when the guards weren't looking and I slept in the airport's overhead loft areas. I remember sitting there, being alone with practically no sound, looking up at the stars through the glass ceiling. I wouldn't say it was fun or reflective or some stuff like that, but it sure made be feel like a homeless person for a few moments.
Traveling around and meeting different people can open your eyes from time to time. Just find a great cafe and a good book and a nice beach. Try climbing a mountain or going on a hike. See a bullfight or visit a festival. Go on a boat ride, not a cruise but on someone's boat who is trying to travel to a strange area full of exotic animals and visual wonders. Find corners of the world that are vastly different from your own. Just stay the hell away from those shopping malls and movie theatres.
O.k., maybe not the movie theaters. Those are O.k.
Reading your essay reminds me very acutely of something Isabelle Huppert told you, sir, at the Cannes Film Festival in 1977. She said that "When I need to escape, I get on a plane and fly to Chicago. It is my secret city. I go where I want, do what I want, nobody recognizes me, nobody can find me." That being said, I would give my weight in gold not to be recognized or found in any of the places you describe. (New York would be my choice, if for no other reason than the feeling of being set free every time I visit.)
Ebert: I remember her saying that so clearly, and it struck me as extraordinary. Huppert was then at the dawn of her career, with "The Lacemaker." This year she will be the chairman of the Cannes jury.
I know it is probably wonderful to sit alone in European cafes and read or take quiet walks alone in Paris, London, or Rome. But did you ever get an opportunity to spend an evening in Rome with Marcello Mastroianni? Or stand in the Trevi Fountain on a cold March evening with Anita Ekberg?
Ebert: You would have heard about it if I had! But I did interview Mastroianni, and took the ski lift at Telluride with Janet Leigh.
It is an ancient mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
"By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?
"The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide,
And I am next of kin;
The guests are met, the feast is set:
May'st hear the merry din."
Strains of music caught unexpectedly in passing are the best. Wordsworth didn't set out that day saying let's look at daffodils today. Never having set foot abroad except amply in the minds eye, I have crowded recollections of places dotting the subcontinenent visited in the course of work and duties (never in the role of a tourist.) The world is a beautiful place,and to be alive the most precious thing,which Lear finally understands. I too "envy" Ebert---
most of all his mind(at times a jazz band, at others an ancient church organ), his crowded life, and the gift(above commented) of universalising the specific---a man of nouns more than adjectives. I only fear he may be too intelligent for his own good. Success is not an unmixed blessing.
To quote my favourite philosopher:
"Life is the most precious of all treasures. Even one extra day of life is worth more than ten million ryo of gold. The Lotus Sutra surpasses all the other sacred teachings of the Buddha’s lifetime because of the “Life Span” chapter. The greatest prince in the land of Jambudvipa would be of less consequence than a blade of grass if he died in childhood. If he died young, even a person whose wisdom shone as brilliantly as the sun would be less than a living dog."
Nichiren Daishonin(1222-1281)
RE: Car Chases in Venice... sadly, I know this one: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen...my only good experience of the film was reading your review and watching you and Roeper lambast it.
“Among the many things I will not do that I planned to do is live in Venice for an extended period. It is a human city. Everyone on foot. Voices within hearing distance. A low rate of violent crime because there are eyes everywhere. I have gone there as often as I possibly could, even twice to the film festival on the Lido, despoiled as it is by cars. I was on the locaton for "Death in Venice" and interviewed Bogarde in the garden of a decaying Palazzo on the Guidecca, its owner, an ancient crone, lurking in the shrubbery. Have you read the travel masterpiece Venice, by Morris? I sometimes wonder if it is possible to make a bad film in Venice. And as you know, you see artists, artists, everywhere”. – Roger Ebert
Ahh…Venice by Morris: I’ve read every brushstroke of it, yes. And I dare say the only thing able to compete with seeing the city we clearly both love, is to stroll through the pages of her book while dreaming of the day you can. For imo, Morris managed to achieve the impossible; she caught a butterfly without having to stick a pin in it, so as to preserve and show it to others.
Oh, what a dangerous door you’ve opened now Roger - you’ve engaged me on Venice! A topic I can never exhaust, but not the only reason why I’m stepping through it. For I can also hear the sigh in: “Among the many things I will not do that I planned to do…” and because I can, can’t resist plopping myself down to a kindred spirit now and doing my best to get him temporarily drunk. Have no fear; I would never insult you with an inferior vintage let alone a dirty glass. I’m going to use the spell checker and everything!
Close your eyes and remember the last time you were at your happiest in Venice. Somewhere alone yet far from feeling it. And how wonderful it was to hear the silence – no cars, the only sound your footsteps on smooth weathered stones, the tourists having thankfully left for the day. Remember how the sunlight reflected off the water to dapple the underside of bridges spanning canals, how it rippled over the mortar, the brick and the glass of buildings nearby making them seem surreal? Remember how the ethereal approach of twilight fell upon the city in shades of salmon pink and gold, gilding the living painting you were walking through, and how the sight of it would have burst your heart had it not expanded to encompass the bliss of it. Remember how the sublime beauty of Venice made you dizzy without making you fall? For one doesn’t fall in Venice, one glides instead like a gondola dreaming. Past the heady decay and glorious decrepitude, the chipping, cracking, painted facades of Palazzos you could only explore with imagination and yet content to; for the best thing about being in Venice is moving through it slowly and savoring each and every second of every feeling it instills. Ahh, Venice; a paradox for it breathes while holding its breath. A thief for stealing yours, but only to then replace it with something lighter than air. Remember the moment when you knew you wanted to live there for an extended period of time and why? Imagine my memory of Venice is yours now and I poured it into the glass from which you have just drunk.
Deep, long, happy sigh.
Now picture us at a café – no, no, not the Florian, nothing so cliched. Let’s go around the corner instead to the Gran Caffe Chioggia, facing opposite the Doge’s Palace in the Piazzetta. That cafe! For while I can’t compete with your enviable memory of Bogarde and Death in Venice, I can share that I was briefly the unofficial artist in residence at the cafe; having been adopted by the musicians who play Jazz there after they saw me at the same table every night sketching away, alone. Note: a woman alone in Venice tends to draw curious stares. I learned from the band it’s because some wonder if it’s yet another hopeful would-be Katherine Hepburn ala “Summertime”. Nope; I’m just an artist on a mission from God and happily distracted by it. I came here to meet Venice. Not Rossano Brazzi. Good thing, they replied. He’s dead.
When they saw I was an artist, I was immediately embraced for in being musicians, again; fellow brethren. Different mediums but we speak the same language. And oh the stories I could tell you of our conversations, of all that Venice revealed to me while I was there. But it would fill up the HD on your server and then it would explode and we don’t want that. So as you finish you glass - which just for the hell of it we’ll say looks like a red goblet, imagine the air filling with the sound of Cantaloupe Island as the café closes for the night. Artists, artists everywhere. Venice overflows with them. Thank God.
And if I’ve managed to express myself well, there’s a kindred spirit named Roger drunk, passed out somewhere in Venice. Sshhh, don’t wake him. Let him finish his dream.
Roger pondered if was possible to make a bad film in Venice? I say no. For I've seen what I consider a contender, "Night Train to Venice", and the sheer incomprehensibility of that shot of "the dobermans" served to lift the film above how bad it was. At least for me.
Again; painter. Visually minded. And when I saw the dobermans I was immediately transported to another film. "Amarcord" by Fellini. Remember his beautiful peacock in snow..? Yup. The dogs did that - for being akin to a shot where something exists purely as the avitar of whatever the director couldn't express any other way. And gosh - so been there, done that too! I'm always searching for words, my thoughts like fingers rummaging through a box of paints. This one? Nah, too muddy. So I can relate when I think I'm seeing someone reach into theirs now: "damn, I know how to say it with words but we're making a picture, what looks like - OH! Never mind, found it!"
Fellini pulls out a peacock. The other guy, dobermans. And the memory of them in Night Train to Venice always makes me laugh. I've half a mind now to grab a shot of Fellini's peacock along with the incomprehensible dobermans - which I confess I love for being so WTF?! - and print them out together onto a t-shirt and wear it whenever I'm trying to paint with words; smile.
Can you write with paint, Roger? If not, at least I can tell you I see the images you make when you write. And "All by ourselves alone" covers my screen with too many colors to count. But then, how could it not; it's about VENICE! It's not like you could screw that up.
I mean, it's not like it's Harold and Maude or anything.
Ebert: They say you can never be bored by a film shot in your house. In the same way, I can't be bored by a film set in Venice. For example, I wasn't bored by "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," because while it didn't offer Dobermans, it had a car chase.
Huh! I had the impression you just run from movie to movie in festivals. (Referring to the Toronto Film Festival.) I'm nineteen already, not a single movie festival...Shame.
PS: This might be personal, but did Rex Reed ever reply as to why he hated Kane playing for free? My cousin saw it - she's my age, 19 - hated it, had an epiphany, loved it and then couldn't stop watching classic films. She's been watching silent movies! Her watching silent movies is like, oh, Freddy Got Fingered winning an Oscar (or being in the same sentence as barrels). We're even going to see The Bicycle Thieves tomorrow.
Ebert: I've done a lot of walking in Toronto. I love used book stores, and there are a lot.
Your cousin has the instinctive love that happens when one movie connects and you realize it isn't only that movie, it's the medium. It can't be explained, only felt.
Silent movies are very special. They can absorb us more than sound films, because they approach the dream state more closely. In a dream, I see people and "hear" what they say, but I do not observe them saying it, so much as embodying it, or "having" said it. Same with silent movies.
Ray's Great City, which I viewed two years ago has more in common with O Henry's Gift of Magi than Walmart. Set in Kolkatta(then Calcutta) of 1950s, it is a quiet and delicate picture capturing nuances of family relations in in the pre TV era of Remington typewriters when horse drawn "taxis"(tonga) mingled with trams,more like the US in say 1936-37. It is altogether opposite to the brazen exuberance of Slumdog Millionnaire,the energy and momentum as you put it,closer to the musical "Chicago". It is a parable about ever transfiguring Mumbai. To what extent it portrays reality may be inconclusively debated, but I have no doubt that it does capture the music and soul and dreams and terrors of an augenblick in time. It is Bollywood triple distilled, yet Bollywood through and through,giving tongue and expression to something that unquestionably exists in the the subterrains of psyche.
What is incredible that an English director made this----it is more Indian than Indian.
Ebert: It is a wonderful film, including the musical number at the end--a true Bollywood touch. India and England seem (to me) to have a relationship that goes deeper than simple colonialism. They may be joined by a mutual fascination with eccentrics. Did you know that the top English author in India is P. G. Wodehouse, and the top Indian author in England is R. K. Narayan?
Your memories are quite evocative. I was in Venice in 1997 on a European tour, and to describe its historical richness would be futile.
Though I did love the city for its history, architecture, art, and unique entirety, I sadly could not stand the smell from the canals (not as bad as it sounds, but it was there at the time, I hope it isn't now). On the last part of our tour I was in the Netherlands, which I kind of liked much better (it feels more laid back, and has its own exquisite cultural heritage), probably because there was no smell at all.
I was wondering if you've ever thought of this, if you've ever been to the Netherlands and if you like it as much.
Ebert: I have never much noticed a smell from the canals, which of course have not been used for sewage for a very long time. Maybe you were there on the wrong day, or in an area where they were dredging.
This blog entry is exactly what I needed today. A grey and cold day, reading news about state scandals and economic crisis' around the world, starting to feel depressed but your essay refreshed me not only because of your second to none writing skills but by the sheer beauty of the contents. A positive piece of writing that people need more of.
Memories of the walks I've taken were relived as I read this. I have been to Venice once, 7 years ago when I was 12. I was there for only 6 hours but I fell in love with the place and have dreamt of revisiting it. I will go back and will try to find the cafeteria you always visit.
Good films to me are also walks. I walk the paths of the characters, of the settings and surroundings and feel that I am somehow inside the picture. 'Lost in Translation' is a film I watch about 2 or 3 times a year and it takes me away on a walk in Tokyo, on a walk with my experiences.
I don't travel much but there are places in the small city I live in that I revisit. Not often but when I feel the need to do so. There is a small beach with a little pineforest on the backround - a path goes through there and you can see the sea and feel the smell of the sea mixed with the smell of pinetrees. I've been there alone on many occasions. Always during Summer sunsets at night when there aren't many people. The first times I took walks there, were with people I was in love with. After that I have always been there alone: walking, thinking and walking along memories and feelings. It gives me the best feeling of tranquility.
Ebert: I don't think it matters where we are. It matters that we are there.
"London is the most endlessly fascinating city I know. I'm almost glad I've never lived there, because I'd never want to get used to it."
I live in it and thought i was bored of it, until i left it for two months, and came back to find that i hadnt scratched the surface, even of the places i go to about once a week. as you say, the pubs and the thickness of history are wonderful. a fan of covent garden? and which is the "oldest restaurant" you go to (there are several claimants)?
venice, on the other hand, is too bizarrely beautiful to think about living in. you visit it, as though in a trance for a week, and then you have to come back to the real world. alas.
Ebert: Rules, on Maiden Lane, near Covent Garden.
The web site claims: Rules was established by Thomas Rule in 1798 making it the oldest restaurant in London. It serves traditional British food, specialising in classic game cookery, oysters, pies and puddings.
I haven't traveled much outside the USA, because I haven't seen the bulk of my own country yet. Of what use are these other places when you don't know your own? After I have seen my own place, and sampled all its treasures, only then will I start looking farther afield.
This in response to your surprise that Governor Palin hasn't traveled outside the USA.
Ebert: I think it's interesting to get a larger picture. Already, however, the world is looking more like America, at least in superficial ways. The franchise chains have made every high street look the same. In London, the Wimpy's and Lyons Corner Houses have all become McDonald's and Starbucks. At least the pubs remain.
Whoops, I shouldn't have said I was lower class in my other comment. I know there are people MUCH worse off than I. I should have said I was on a lower rung of the middle class. I have been able to travel the world by virtue of living within my means and maintaining a savings account instead of credit card debt (and I know many Americans don't have that luxury).
The way I see it, he said
You just cant win it...
Everybody's in it for their own gain
You can't please em all
There's always somebody calling you down
I do my best
And I do good business
There's a lot of people asking for my time
They're trying to get ahead
They're trying to be a good friend of mine
I was a free man in Paris
I felt unfettered and alive
There was nobody calling me up for favors
And no ones future to decide
You know I'd go back there tomorrow
But for the work I've taken on
Stoking the star maker machinery
Behind the popular song
I deal in dreamers
And telephone screamers
Lately I wonder what I do it for
If l had my way
I'd just walk through those doors
And wander
Down the Champs Elysees
Going cafe to cabaret
Thinking how I'll feel when I find
That very good friend of mine
Your cafe experience reminded me of what David Foster Wallace, in his Kenyon address, called "the mystical oneness of all things deep down." An intense feeling of being fully present. The trickery of the past and future dissolve. The labeling process of language and thought, which fragment experience and the world, get temporarily suspended. Lovely to read. Much thanks.
My best friend and I were to go to Scotland to celebrate our 50th birthdays. We'd been friends for 36 years, and had often celebrated major birthdays with vacations together. Unfortunately, life demanded that she cancel her trip; the only question was whether I would go alone - fairly daunting for a middle-aged woman making her first trip abroad. Life demanded I go, so I did, backpacking my way for three weeks. I met up with a French internet friend in the Shetlands, and a German internet friend in the Borders, but most of my trip was done alone.
Three weeks is a long time to be alone anywhere, especially when one is never alone otherwise - husband, family, friends, pets, horses, always demanding time and attention. It was wonderful, and lonely. And wonderful. I was adopted twice, once by passengers on a train and once by a tiny town on Skye.
I was to make my way from Edinburgh to Aberdeen by train, to meet a ferry for the Shetlands. The scheduling was a bit tight, and I ran into the train station, breathlessly asking, "Which train?" The station attendant waved in a general direction and said, "Better hurry." I joined the crowds racing for the train, which I just managed to catch. Joy! Found a seat, relaxed, and caught my breath. All very well, until the ticket taker looked at my ticket, looked at me, and said, "Uh, no, there is a problem." My heart froze - had I broken some rule? I hadn't been on a train since I was a tiny child. Took a stab at one possibility - "Am I in the wrong car?" He shook his head. "Uh, no...uh, this is the train to Glasgow, not Aberdeen." (Bad news is ever so much more pleasant when delivered with a Scottish accent, don't you think?)
"That's not good, is it?" I said with a bit of a smile. I'm on vacation, I thought to myself (and as Billy Crystal said to Jack Palance) - so I decided not to stress even if I missed the ferry.
The ticket taker took pity on me though, and spent some time looking into alternatives. He came up with one - I could make a train to Aberdeen provided I get off at a certain rural stop and run to the other side. At that point, all the passengers in the car got into the spirit and began giving the poor lost American woman directions - how far we were from the stop at any moment, how much time I had at any moment, just what route I was to take to get across the tracks to make the other side in the shortest amount of time. We arrived at the stop, I ran out of the train, huffed and puffed my way up the steps, across the bridge and down the other side, just in time. Everyone from my car, including the lovely ticket taker, laughed and waved to me as their train pulled away.
In the tiny town, I guess they didn't get too many middle-aged women backpacking their way through alone. My B&B hostess invited me down for camomile tea one night, when she had to stay up past midnight to wait for (inconsiderate) latecomers. We looked at photo albums and discussed her farflung children and grandchildren, in South Africa, in Australia. She gave me the little local newsletter to read, and I discovered my husband's ancestors may well have hailed from that area.
The innkeeper two miles or so down the road knew of me. I was greeted by name when I arrived for dinner one night. "You're staying with Mrs. MacIntosh, aren't you?"
The sea fog rolled in as I sat there eating fish that was caught that morning. I sipped a fine single malt that can't be gotten in the States while a coal fire warmed my back. A sweet Gaelic song played in the background. I sat there for several hours, looking out the window at fog. Every so often, sheep would wander into view. A lamb nibbled on the bumper of a Jaguar.
When I left the town on the postbus, other passengers knew me. "You stayed with Mrs. MacIntosh, didn't you? Did she treat you well?"
Unlike you, I doubt I will ever return to those places, not because I can't, but because I don't want to. They wouldn't be the same, and the new memories might diminish the wonderful older memories I have. There are other places, and new memories to make.
Ebert: You know, I think stories like yours are making this thread one of my favorites of all the threads so far, right up there with "Perform a Concert in Words."
Thank you Evan (2nd comment) for complementing my hometown of Quebec City.
It is true that americans can enjoy the same comfort as described in Roger's story and don't have to travel across the atlantic to get it.
Did you know that H.P Lovecraft longest book is one written about his trip there, I guess he was inspired...
I grew up in Glendale, Arizona, near the intersection of 59th Avenue and Camelback Road, which in 1958 was the "edge of town" with a huge painted sign of NO CITY TAX FOR CIGARETTES OR LIQUOR. A fellow named John F. Long was selling houses, ours among them, as fast as he could raise them up; rumor had it that a wall of one of the houses came down when they'd tacked down a carpet and pulled it tight.
Now the "edge of town" is more than twenty miles to the west, somewhere past a world-famous stadium that looks at a distance like a colossal bundt cake. Human habitation in the Valley has spread like a fungus.
Recently I drove past 59th and Camelback, and found that my beloved Circle K, a convenience store I brought my custom to from before the top of my head topped the cashier's counter (remember those old Cash Registers?), barefoot in July (you can walk on asphalt in 115 degrees barefoot, using the Foot-Curling Technique; walking on coals wouldn't have scared me), offering my penny for a pink brick of Bazooka Joe Bubble Gum--that beloved Circle K is boarded up, with a chain-link fence around it. Heartwrench!
You know the opening cityscape in the original PSYCHO, with the octagonal, eagled Valley National Bank sign? That's where I had my first savings account--bankbook #3937-3077. Valley National Bank is no more; it's been gone for a long time . . .
Having been raised in Impermanenceville, I can understand the appeal of something you can count on to be there year after year, and your rich exposition (WOW, it's great to read the phrase "for that was his name" again!) and those of your readers made me nostalgic for what I'd never experienced.
At least Camelback Mountain looks the same--from a great distance . . . when the air is clear . . .
My beautiful friend Roger,
Oh the ecstacy and perfection of European charm! It is very appropriate reading your essay here, speaking to my thoughts and itches of the past few days and hours. I just listened to a moody, 'dub-step' album that accompanied my flight with my wife to London just over a year ago. As we flew across the Atlantic, one of the most startling features is leaving the East Coast at sunset, flying through an abbreviated night of no sleep (from nervousness and excitement) and crossing all of that blackness (hence the moody 'dub-step'). Yet, as you watch the big screen chart your progress in front of you, anticipation turns into a dream-like satisfaction as you look out the window (I will, by the way, never get over the magic of flight) at the cars below you, small, almost imperceptible, yet obviously, undeniably on the left side of the road. A small novelty, yet when you look down and you see that, the enchantment begins. From that moment on, leading to a sunrise taxi drive into the heart of London, past Big Ben and into trafalgar square I was overcome by sadness more than anything. From the moment I arrived I was already dissatisfied with a visit. This felt like coming home, not going on a trip. It was difficult to sink in any sort of satisfaction knowing we would leave in 7 days. We walked around at Christmas-time, through Oxford street, through gardens and past buckingham palace... it would be impossible to relay every experience, which seems surreal now. But my favorite was a pub in Soho. It wasn't really a famous or all that special location, but it contained a certain level of anonymity and singular charm. This sole trip outside the states for our honeymoon was one of those defining moments of my life. It made me realize how I feel more at home in Europe and with an international community. We stood in line for the millennium wheel and you felt the presence of around 25 nationalities in eye-sight. It has been my ambition ever since to return for a lengthy stay. I won't be satisfied until doing so... a partial consolation and hopefully one step towards going back to school in the U.K. was the news on Christmas Eve, one year after arriving in London, that a theology journal out of the University of London was accepting a paper on David Lynch and Flannery O'Connor for publication next year. I submitted it a year and a half ago... i'm done with this Island yet, not by a long shot. there is so many more places for me to melt in wonderful anonymity in corners of London and Paris and Germany and Holland...
Thanks for this entry, it calls to mind for myself memories of reading Walker Percy's novels of existentialism. 'The Moviegoer' especially. this entry has a lot in common with 'the moviegoer'
I can only dream of walking in these glorious footsteps; it is dismaying when the most "exotic" place I've seen is Disney's Animal Kingdom.
But I do know that moment of overwhelming happiness that you describe. I usually have it on a warm summer night in a baseball stadium. This past year, it was in the bleachers at U.S. Cellular Field, on the third of three consecutive nights of riding the el to 35th and Shields. In 2007, it came at Dodger Stadium, truly one of California's most beautiful features.
On rare occasions, that feeling washes over me at the movie theater. I felt a tingle when WALL-E and EVE danced among the stars.
Forgot to ask: Is your title referring to a line in "Slow Boat to China"?
Forgot to add: For a penny you not only got the gum but a mini-comic-stripped rectangle of high-gloss paper, which you could save for carnival-slum-type prizes! (I haven't been in the market for Bubble Gum for decades, but a fresh piece of that stuff would chew just fine right now. A STALE piece, though--forget it!)
Ebert: Yep.
Speaking of gum, whatever happened to Black Jack and Beeman's Pepsin and Adams' Sour Apple?
Its nice to know that Wodehouse is as familiar in US as in India---it was a favourite dish for me too in more leisurely times. And now ,Ebert in Malgudi too. I didn't realise R K Narayan was that well known abroad.Long live the English language and may the sun never set on it. Like you I am contemporaneous with Woodstock, and how I envied the flower people who used to be a common sight as I slogged in my job in the seventies, made easier with movies like Camelot and River Kwai and the second hand book bazaars which even till yesterday and today sprawl on the pavement on specific days.. Just now seeing the first thirty minutes of Baraka .....what a planet!
I lived in London for one year that ended recently, and Sir John Soane's museum is one of the places I never tired of visiting and invariably dragged friends and relatives to. When it comes to museums, my idea is that everybody knows to go to the British Museum and both National Galleries, but they'll never learn about Soane unless somebody urges them to.
However, when it comes to London museums, I consider the Wallace Collection to be another mostly unknown must-see.
Ebert: There you go. And, it's not a museum, but have you ever been to Lord Leighton's House, near Notting Hill?
You've reminded me of my reading habits.
Who was it that said there is no such thing as reading, only rereading? I think it was Nabokov.
Like with traveling there a plenty of books I haven't read, but should. Huckleberry Finn, for example. For another, I've never been to London. But I think I've read The Great Gatsby half a dozen times, and will probably read it again. I do not think I am wasting my time, but with that said I should probably go to London and read more Twain.
Ebert: You won't regret it. And you've read Dickens?
I'd be surprised to learn that Palin had traveled to many places inside the USA. Sludging through swing States can't be counted as traveling. I'd be shocked to learn she'd taken walks in order to find a secluded place to think. I'd be flabbergasted to learn she'd read any poetry outside of that assigned to her in high school lit classes.
I have been to London and the Canadian wilderness. I've had hard cider in a village pub and made crude jokes about spotted dick. I've shared a bend of a river with a very large bull moose. I've been to Chicago and San Diego but not New York. I have never been to Venice or Tokyo or Paris. I have seen these places in movies and read about them in books, and yet I have absolutely no sensory knowledge of any of them. (I am glad, though, to learn the canals of Venice do not smell of sewage.)
I think it is sad that every corner - yes, corners are extremely important - of America is beginning to resemble every other corner. I think it is tragic that any corner throughout the rest of the world might resemble America, even superficially.
If I finally arrive in Paris and see a McDonald's, I will not be proud of American influence. I will be ashamed.
Ebert: It's not all on our backs. The French have McDonalds' because the French go to McDonald's.
Memories may turn magenta with age, but no reason our photographs need to:
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/SEG8w3l2LtT0sWX2lvNlUw?feat=directlink
Ebert: Remarkable. How did you do that?
Thank you Mr. Ebert for a lovely read. I felt the places in your narration and so enjoyed the organic presentation of your remembrances.
To me, your last two blog entries "Things Fall Apart; The Centre Cannot Hold" and "The Birds of Prey are Circling" coupled with this entry says collectively that you feel the future is unfriendly and people are mean so you have gone to your happy places. I am not sure if this was your intention.
Lastly, my weekend mornings are much enriched by your posts. Your journeys of what interest you and the following reader commentary are a delight. I thank you again and thank you to your readership.
Ebert: It was time to cheer up a little.
I have lived in Boston in the same neighborhood for all of my 23 years. On quiet days, i walk by Boston Common where i had my first kiss , reminisce about the little movie theater where I saw Moulin Rouge and my friends can-can in the aisle, the time my friend and i ate so much at the Pour House we slept on a public bench at Commonwealth Ave, 12 years of doing the Walk for Hunger, how everywhere i go i am reminded of certain someone, part wishing he was there and part wishing it never happened.
All that is so long ago, so much has changed since those days. Yet, those memories are not any less real than remembering what i had for lunch. When i am in those places, i pause. in my mind, i see the old events again unfolding like a movie, always in wide shot. the characters are familiar. The role of me taken by someone much prettier and happier, blurred by a selective memory and Time.
i hope to travel and have my little rituals, where i could be me and not think about anything else other than the present. On my first vacation to Bermuda, at Tobacco Bay, i found a slice of heaven. I hope to return many times. If i ever get to go to Venice, i will look for you and your Hawaiian shirt.
thank you for your words. take care.
When my grandfather moved his wife and five children from Mexico City, to start practicing medicine in Dallas, Texas, his father took my mother, aunts and uncles to all of the states and sights of Mexico, so that they would never forget where they came from. The same man, my great-grandfather, wrote a love poem to his wife every night that they were married, over fifty years. When she died, she was buried with them; a small mountain of paper. She never allowed anyone to read the notes.
I have a photo of me on his lap, shortly before he died. I was two, so I never got to experience him. But he set a bar. So very high.
Ebert: The story about those poems make you realize how much of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "magic realism" may simply be realism.
all this traipsing down memory lane,waxing nostalgic makes one a tad nervous
Ebert: Relax. We're going back to Cannes this spring, and we'll doubtless stop off in London on the way home. I'm feeling better now than I have in a while.
What I have found over many-a-year is that I can have the kinds of places both close to home and afar with respect to what you describe.
As an old, and I am old, Brooklyn boy who was in the film and tv industry a-way back, I still find I'm delighted to go to the Red Flame, a classic NY coffee shop, a dying breed, adjacent to the Algonquin, and sit at the counter and "schmooze" the countermen and observe the ebb and flow of typical New Yorkers as well as the tourists who find their way into the place. Then I similarly have the Hotel Edison coffee shop, affectionately named the "Polish Tea Room" by Neil Simon. There I'll take a booth adjacent to the counter and read and watch.
In Rome, while Bernice catches her extra beauty rest, I wend my way to the piazza at the Pantheon and settle in at one of the cafes which serves suberb cafe americano with croissant as I read and keep my camera at "the ready." Venice has a working class cafe for lunch near the Bauer Hotel which I love just to get into the mix of the tumult which invariably occurs every lunchtime.
In Vienna I have a favorite which sits on the plaza opposite St. Stephan's Cathedral. It's cafe which serves incomparable schlag and strudel. I sit, read, camera at "the ready" watching the passing parade and chatting up the servers. While close by, I photographed with a "toy camera" the ferris wheel made famous in "The Third Man."
I think we all have our favorites in the cities we love and operate differntly based upon our personalties.
I liked your essay, but I especially liked your response to Bob K.
Let me add another comment to Bob: Give yourself more credit. The fact that you would save up enough money to go to Iceland and Japan tells me you are a class act of the first order. I'd bet you use your library and see foreign movies, too. :)
I was more appalled that Bush (a blue blood who could have gone anywhere on a whim) had not exercised the intellectual curiousity to explore the world.
For readers who have that inner curiosity to explore but are short on funds (like most of us these days), the best site I've found is www.travelzoo.com. They list international deals weekly. I've been to England, Scotland (Edinburgh is the nost beautiful city I've ever seen), Venezula, Trinidad, Peru, Mexico and France twice.
Speaking of France, in 2004 I surprised my wife with three days in Paris (a travelzoo deal including flight and hotel from Chicago for $500 bucks each). We were worried that we would get backlash from the French when they found out we were Americans. We should have given them more credit. They were able to differentiate between a few zealots here and the average American. Too bad a whole bunch of us couldn't do the same thing for them.
We visited the Louvre the first time we went. It amazed me that people would ignore everything else and go immediately to the crowd surrounding the Mona Lisa, snap a picture and, I assume, leave for Eurodisney. (Why would one need a picture of the Mona Lisa? Can't you get a postcard?!?)
I've been twice in Edinburgh for the festival, and another time in January, when it was very cold.
It's cool in Scotland in summer, too. I was in Perthshire in 1976 in August. The local newspaper had a banner headline:
"Scorching heat wave to continue. High of 72 today."
I was only 11 at the time, so some of the things I remember most is going to the local pub with my father's uncle and aunts. Uncle Jimmy gave me money and asked me to get him a beer. So I walked up to the bar, asked for the beer, paid for it, and brought it back to him.
I remember the tourist trap at Bannockburn (and I remember slamming the car door on my thumb). I remember Edinburgh castle.
And I remember that my grandfather was an itinerant farm worker before my father's family moved to Canada. As we drove through lowland Scotland on the autoroutes, we'd pass these signs announcing the existence of a little town a few miles away, and my father would say, "! We used to live there." And finally, it got to the point where we'd pass a sign for a town and my sisters and I would say, "You used to live there, didn't you, Dad?"
"Yep."
I remember most of all the beauty of the land. Loch Ness, Loch Lomond, the cliffs at Dunbar, the gardens in Ayrshire - they all speak to me now, with the haziness of memories of 30 years past, of roots and history and connectedness with things and people and places that are other than myself.
Ebert: I found a mountain lake outside Pitlochry that was so perfectly still that, as an experiment, I photographed the reflection of the peaks and clouds in the water, inverted the print, and passed it off as the real thing.
There are a few things that struck me as I read your essay. It made me think of rituals and the mind-numbing spread of large chains, of neighbors and neighborhoods, of learning or re-learning how to be in the moment.
You recently wrote about greed and how greed has created a tremendous hole in the fabric of the United States and yet what you write about now seems to be what so many corporations have neglected. People have rituals and people want the familiar--to have someone recognize you and know you, if not your name something about you. That would seem to be nearly impossible with the impersonal nature of chain restaurants and stores and the constant turnover of employees. There is value in keeping staff on for long periods if not for a lifetime. Do enough corporations give incentives to keep their staff? I worked for two major global corporations and I think the answer is a resounding no.
When one lives in a place, truly inhabits it, one wants to be known, even if it is only as the person who drops by every Friday for dessert or walks their dog every morning at 7:30 a.m. You see people. You are seen and hopefully, you are not totally ignored. How can that happen when the staff changes from month to month or year to year. How can that happen when the people there are transients, staying in a place but not really living there.
I haven't been to Venice and quite frankly, I had not been intrigued with that city until reading this essay although I would, should I have the chance, more likely wander and find my own places. I do find some people travel and seem most pleased when they go and see what they are told everyone who goes there must see, but my impression is that other people like yourself like to create a type of neighborhood--in a global context. Rituals are what create neighborhoods and neighbors and even keep families and communities together.
I lived in England as a student, including a brief few months in London. As an American, I found I was recognized less as an individual by many of the small shops I frequented and more as an ethnicity (Hong Kong Chinese from their point of view although I am not an ethnic Chinese). One could assume that is very British, but alas one of my fellow American students, on the very same fellowship as I, didn't recognize me either when I passed him outside of our fellowship activities and even when I was standing beside him in a line. That was positively disheartening.
Should I have the chance to return to places I have been to, some where I have actually lived in the past, there are certain places I would like to see again although perhaps they are no longer there. In Southern California, there are places I like to take people or go to alone.
There is great beauty in moments of being alone when you are not really lonely. I am often struck by people who seem to never be alone or never want to be alone. I think to create art including writing one needs solitude to a certain extent. Yet out of that solitude, one wants to share one's art because why create if not to share? With our secret places, our own secret gardens of the mind, perhaps by sharing their location, someone else can find solace, inspiration or inner peace by going there.
There are places that I remember well. I immediately thought of one in Los Angeles when I read your essay. I was working at very large company and I was miserable. The place was open to everyone, a small chapel of sorts yet unlike any church I had been to. I could find peace there and pray or meditate. I also would wander to the many rooms of the re-built central library--not to read, but to look at the wonderful art: the elevator with old catalog cards and some hanging sculptures that I find intriguing and looking that them always cheers me up. They also have art exhibits and until 8 March 2009, they have on one entitled: "The Fine Art of Film Posters."
I also discovered urban gardens, one near the Fashion Institute, that was in walking distance. Jon Jerde designed the campus. He also designed Westside Pavilion in West Los Angeles and San Diego's Horton Plaza. Horton Plaza is best appreciated very early in the morning, before the people come to shop.
Working at the company, I learned about another urban garden. The Isamu Noguchi California Scenario Sculpture Garden is in Orange County, just across from South Coast Plaza. Look for Jerry's Deli and go through the orange stained glass gates. I was sad to find some panels missing, but the garden is still there. Sit at the top of the grassy slope on the benches. Surrounded by trees, you can hear the wind and the rustle of the leaves and almost forget you are in a city. On a hot day, you can dip your feet in the running water that represents a river running across the desert.
There was a time when I was in living in San Diego and went to Balboa Park at least once a month. An old rock shop is still there in the Spanish Village--the center of rockhounding activities in San Diego. I went there recently to touch a large piece of petrified wood. Where I haven't been lately is the hummingbird aviary in the San Diego Zoo. It's a place where one must move slowly and be quiet and if one is lucky a hummingbird may come up and even pull a bit of hair for its nest. At certain times of the day and week, there are few people there.
In the spring, I have, on the advice of local gardening friends taken short road trips--one to somewhere called Moon Shadow Road with a camera and my first collie. I was singing the Cat Stevens song on the way out, of course. My dog wasn't singing, but minding my driving.
Another trip (this time with friends and a different collie) was to a hidden valley in the Lake Elsinore area where there are still hillsides of California poppies in the early spring.
I am hoping for rain in February because in Southern California, February showers brings March and April flowers. I'd tell you where, but you'd have to also know when. For that, you'd have to follow the Wildflower Hotline.
These are places to turn off your cell phone and enjoy being in the moment. While people might not tell you to turn off your cell and tune into the experience, in wildflower areas, rattlesnakes might make it clear they do not like being disturbed.
Ebert: How wonderfully evocative.
I should have made clear that in addition to revisiting loved places, I also go off the beaten track. In Venice, it is necessary to get lost. In the London book, I observe that in setting off across the Heath, you are quite likely to get lost, and in that case, "always ask a dog owner." I've had a piecemeal London project over the years picking out a tube stop, coming to the surface, and wandering around.
I'm quite sure this little missive won't be published, but thought it an opportune moment to humbly observe that, while I admire your writing above all others', Mr. Ebert, your blog threads strike me as very often little more than the pretentious mutterings of a very self-involved, and particularly self-celebratory lot. I refer not to you, but your readers. Honestly, it seems every other poster's message can be boiled down to a message of "those damn philistines, if only everyone in the world were like ME!", followed by fill-in-the-blank examples of how cultured, sophisticated, and gosh-darn-it under-appreciated they are.
Bollocks.
Ebert: They may indeed be under-appreciated, but I don't believe they're philistines.
Dear Mr E,
Thanks for sharing such an intimate look into your life. The pleasure of being detached yet still immersed is one that we also extract from good cinema, no?
When I was 15 I was able to sneak away from a student group in London for an afternoon. Walked around and rode the Tube and got as lost as one can (when one has a good map and speaks the language.) As a kid from rural North Carolina I felt like the big city and its history swallowed me up and I became a part of it (and it a part of me.) I can recall with great clarity the exhilaration of being free and alone and so far removed from everything I'd ever known, almost thirty years ago. My passport expired last year and I haven't renewed it yet. I need to move that up on my to do list.
My wife Stefi and I spent a pleasant day and night in Venice in February 1973. We were passengers bound for Haifa, Israel aboard the Italian passenger ship Messapia, scheduled to embark the next morning.
In wandering around Venice the day preceding embarkation, we passed a sunny day and rainy night wandering about the backwater canals, bridges and walkways of the old city, some of which may well have greatly antidated the age of the great doges who controlled the Venetian empire along the eastern Mediterranean seacoasts.
(A walking tour of Venice produces greater satisfaction than sitting around the main square fending off touts for the local glass factories who work the tourist trade. The result of which otherwise must be a large amount of expensive and fragile glass to carry around. To escape such people, both in Venice and Athens, I had my wife Stefi address them in her native Croatian language rather than my English. Nobody in western or southern Europe in 1973 had serious expectation of selling anything to a citizen of Tito's communist Jugoslavia.)
That evening, we came across a small cafe exactly like the one you described. They indeed may have been one and the same storefronts.
When we got to the ship that night, and fell into the company of a number of Israelis returning home from Europe, we learned that the shipping line would serve as a floating motel that night, but would not feed us until after the ship set sail.
So we told our new friends about the small cafe we had found. They let us lead them back to it, and we found the place after a circuitous walk.
After 36 years, the details of the meals we ate have escaped from my memory. But the food was delicious and inexpensive, the ambience pleasant.
Unfortunately, the only aspect of Venice seen by most Americans is an early Commander James Bond tossing a role of film into one of the canals, and a later rendition of the same James Bond watching helplessly as his girlfriend drowns in a collapsing building located along what may possibly be the same canal. On the other hand, they both were enjoyable film dramas; so perhaps my complaint should rightfully fall on deaf ears.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
I've been very fortunate, despite my modest means, to do a lot of traveling in the years before I became a father of 3.
My wife and I spent our honeymoon traveling around Italy, Venice was one of the first places we visited, I knew right away that I would have to visit it again and again, possibly retire here one day, my parents are Italian and it would be possible for me to become an Italian citizen...so who knows. After we had ended our trip with a 10 day stay in Rome, we had a couple of days to spare...and rather than go to our intended next stop in Tunisia, we headed right back to Venice...I felt like I'd come home again.
But of all the places in the world, there is this place called Horn Head on the Northern coast of Ireland that is perhaps the most magical place I'd ever been to...not another human being as far as the eye can see with some of the most spectacular scenery I'd ever seen. I've gone back there twice with my kids, and I would never pass up a chance to return...
Thanks for the musing, Roger.
Love your quote from the Cannes book.
I have recently felt the stillness of being that you describe in your quote in the strangest of places: an early morning commuter train.
For about six month now, every Wednesday morning, I go to Montreal on the 7:30 train. I climb on at the first stop, Saint-Hilaire station, 40 km from the city, and the train is quiet and roomy. I sit on one of the long four place benches, just beside the chrome hand post; that's where there is the most place for my legs and my bag. There is no Muzak, just train noises; crunches and bumps, a bit of quiet chatting here and there.
My kids are OK at home, getting ready for school, my wife is having her morning coffee and rushing about, getting things ready; for me, work is still 40 minutes away. The cell phone is off. The train starts through the open countryside and I start reading, or drawing. At each stop along the line, a new lot of passengers moves in and it gets more and more crowded. I don't know anybody around me, and nobody knows me. I'm reading books from project Gutenberg on my PDA, Tom Jones, The Pickwick Papers, a collection of H.G Wells stories, some old S.F from before S.F existed. The couple in front of me is listening to two different movies on their separate Ipods; (not good, I think). I get deeper into the story ... and that's when it happens: the old books on the electronic gadget, the unknown but familiar faces (20 minutes from Montreal, we are pretty well all from the same extended village) the alternating sun and shade, the open fields streaming by create a feeling of timelessness and continuity; a kind of infinity.
It doesn't happen every time, but when it does, when the sun is right, the book is good and the noise level just so, it is a glorious half hour.
And then we cross the river, we draw into the station under the Queen Elisabeth hotel, I put my gadget away and I get into the flow of people, hundreds and hundreds of us getting on with it, off to the office and on with our busy lives.
amitiés,
Michel Lamontagne
I assume that you have a spot you go to Chicago. I wouldn't ask where that spot is, because in your hometown you should keep it to yourself.
I also live in Chicago, and what solitude do I like best? Summer or autumn, on a bike, at two in the morning. At that time I can see the city as few do. It's quiet rows of three and four flats, through neighborhoods of grids, bridges, shops, and parked cars offer a sense of calm that the city normally does not allow. Few will see me ride by
Ebert: I love the prairie-style shelter overlooking the Alfred Caldwell Lily Pad reached via the little gate at the North End of the Lincoln Park Zoo, or via Fullerton Parkway.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rcktmanil/2522051880/
Thank you for this. I have enjoyed your reviews and other writings for a long time now. I have such rituals, sometimes even when simply going to a certain theater in town I'll take a particular walk after the movie. This touched a spot in the soul.
And it has never mattered to me if anyone else would love these places as I do.
I pass Dismal Nitch (the Lewis and Clark expedition apparently had no place for spelling checkers) and cross the bridge from Washington into Oregon. Arriving in Astoria, I stop at Josephson's, where I buy smoked salmon and crackers and never fail to think of my Dad, who smoked fish better than anyone else ever has. Farther on, in Tillamook, I stop at the cheese factory and buy curds. If I turn back at that point, I go to Portland, to Powell's.
But if I have money enough and time I stay at the Wolf Creek Inn ("the oldest continuous use hotel in the state of Oregon") even though I never splurge on the room that Clark Gable always stayed in, and then go on, farther south, to stand still and breathe deep among the redwoods.
Sometimes, to my amazement, a well-known path turns up enticements I'd never realized it held and I quickly enshrine them, too. I stand on the deck of the tiny Ferry Wahkiakum (Ride the last Ferry on the Lower Columbia River) and think of Tom and Huck. And Burgerville, which first caught my attention with its sign warning that there would not be another Burgerville for approximately another 24,700 miles. How could I let that chance pass?
Without such places and moments it's all just getting from one place to another.
Aaron just clocked in with "pretentious mutterings of a very self-involved, and particularly self-celebratory lot" describing your readership (repliership?)--I don't think so. This blog in particular seems more about nice places than the people who visited them. It's like a lot of eyes on a lot of pieces in the world, and some nice Micro-History for the getting.
Forget the bubble gum. Nearly every brand has succumbed to the addition of apartame (or: the rat killing sweetener of choice). Oh, wherefore art thou days of cavity inducing sugar? Select markets still sell Black Jack and Beeman's, but I hardly ever see them. For Christmas, I bought everyone in my family the following, and it is an oral care revelation I'd like to share with the world. Try it, people, and tell me you don't feel fresher in the mouth region than ever before. I personally guarantee that when I am less poor, I will reimburse you your complaints. Each product is all natural. "Tom's of Maine" dental floss(Will you ever feel a need to return to your old floss after this?), "Kiss My Face" Triple Action toothpaste (This splendid toothpaste is made in Italy and sold in Europe under the name "AloeDent." It is made from an aloe vera base, and without saccharine), "Jason" Healthy Mouth Cinnamon and Tea Tree Mouthwash (You will emit the scent of cloves to the four corners of the earth, and stimulate alien life on Pluto.) Eco Dent gum (Regular chewing gum fills you up with toxins. This gum is full of vitamins, has no sugar, no chemical ingredients, and fights plaque and tartar.) And for the best toothbrush available on the market, try the electric Oral B Triumph, which dentists refer to as a business killer. I didn't invent this stuff, and I don't work for any of the companies. I think that this post is highly inappropriate, but I was just waiting for an "in" and the gum remark provoked it. Roger, if you and Chaz would like to try them, I will be very happy to send them to you. Just let me know an address where I can send them. Not the electric toothbrushes, but the rest of the stuff.
Ebert: I have the toothbrush, and you are correct. Also about Tom's of Maine.
This is one of the greatest pieces you have posted and it reminds me of why I love films such as Before Sunset and Woody Allen's latest, Vicky Cristina Barcelona (or even Manhattan for that matter). I even find it in Fellini's films, there is something magical about them. On top of being good films they also transport you to a beautiful city and you just get lost in at all.
My dream has always been to travel and take in foreign cities just as you have described. Hopefully, one day, I will be able to just that.
One of my most favourite piaces where I have never been is Toledo with those "indigo clouds ,pregnant with inky rain".
I've lived most of the past decade far away from my native California. I'm romantic for the first year or so about it, when I lived alone in a big house out in a Korean hamlet. I ate nearly every evening meal in what, back home, constitutes a dive run by two sisters. Traveling in a new direction and being the only Other for miles is something of note when it's new, and those memories are dear to me. Now, I'm not in the hamlet anymore and being the only Other has long since gone from being an experience to being a lifestyle. My exotic early days are now domestic. Certain doors are closed as paths are chosen. I would have no taste for the dive anymore if I was near it. I paid hundreds of dollars (in Korean won) for more than a hundred meals made by those two sisters' hands and I never knew their names, nor would they remember me now.
At work this week, a girl brought in a book about card readings. I prefer to rely on spiritual faith for understanding, and fear to tread too deeply into astrology. But my birthday was the following day, and curiosity took hold. January 9th equals 5 of Spades. I turned to that page. The title in bold: THE WANDERER. My heart hopped. "They have an unquenched desire for travel, and may leave the country very often. They get restless in the same situations, and may even move into a new apartment every 6 months. This trend seems to settle down at about the age of 39." Wow. I was beginning to think that I had a severe illness, but I'm just a 5 of Spades.
Things may have changed drastically for young travelers who have grown up in the age of the internet. They have the opportunity for live chats with people across continents. The best I could get at their age was a penpal from Brooklyn. My history and geography teachers had a lot to say about the Roman Empire and Africa, but they never really came to life for me, possibly because I never felt like I'd be going anywhere. If only they had ended the lesson on Michelangelo with "And in about 5 years, you will fall asleep in a sidewalk picture booth near the Sistine Chapel, causing a line of train ticket buyers to ponder the lingering duration of those legs peeping out from behind the curtain," I would have been a more dedicated student.
I fell asleep in that booth, because I travel without preparation. And because hotels in Rome are too expensive for student travelers. I was lucky to find the Sistine Chapel at all, without a map. I got so good with my memorization of "Mi scusi, dove blah blah blah" that a lady assumed I was Italian, and went so quickly and so fast, that by the time I realized I should tell her I don't speak Italian, it seemed embarrassing by at least 2 minutes. I thought it was fine, until she said something else and I said, "Si" and she said, "No, blah blah blah" and I realized it was a question, but repeated "Si" and she said "No, no.. blah blah blah" and I said "Si," and she clicked her tongue and waved me off as a moron.
Well, good riddance to Rome. Good riddance to the man by the Colosseum who ripped me off 8 dollars on a bottle of water, and the creepy guy by the train tracks who followed me and whispered something that must have meant "I'm going to cut off your ear lobes," and good riddance to sleeping on sidewalks and in photo booths. I wanted the Italy of Romeo and Juliet. I wanted something less overwhelming. Something that a poor traveling student could master.
I opened the curtain of the photo booth, to greet the blinding sun, and set off for- I dunno, Florence. First thing I did on that train was, I propped my feet up on the seat across from me and prepared for a nice long nap. I relaxed for two minutes, until a train worker rushed up to me and yelled at me. He shook his finger at me, and demanded my legs unprop themselves. But he showed mercy at my intimidated response of "I'm sorry" and rushed right back with a newspaper. He grabbed both of my legs and put them back up, shoes on paper, smiled joyfully, said "Ah, now that will do" in Italian, and patted my shoulder. My love for Italy swelled at that moment.
I slept right through the stop in Florence, and when they called out "Bologna," and I saw how calm it appeared, compared to Rome, I stepped out. It took me a few hours to find the only youth hostel in Bologna. By the time I reached it, I had not showered in a day and a half. It turned out that the hostel required a Euro hostel membership card. One could not be purchased on the spot. Would they let me at least pay for a shower? No, they would not. It was back to the train station area for me, dirty, homeless, stupid young traveler, whose return ticket to London was not for another 6 days. I figured that I could suffer 5 homeless days, but they would need to be 6 showered days.
I found a fountain to sit by- but of course I did! I sat feeling exhilarated and depressed all at once, and I thought this and I thought that, and ultimately thought that I'd put myself in my own mess and, well at least it would be a nice fountain to wake up to each morning. But, just then, over there, there sat a boy, and there sat a girl, and perhaps they might speak English. "Yes, some English. We're university students. Bologna is famous for universities." Did they know any affordable hotels in Bologna? "No, sorry," said Salvo. "No, I don't," said Elisabetta. That was okay. It was nice to have someone to talk to anyway. We talked about this, and we talked about that, and then Salvo wanted to know my favorite music. "Pop" was not the answer he wanted. "I mean, who is your favorite singer?" I said that he wouldn't know, that there is not a chance he could know, because in the year 1998, she was hardly even famous anymore in America. Now, when I am asked this question, I hate to answer it. When I say that it is Belinda Carlisle, it is like shoving a wad of last night's carnival cotton candy in the interviewer's mouth. What is missing from the answer, is how my older brothers blasted hard rock music from their electric guitar amplifiers all day long, all through my life, and how my older sister gave me refuge in Belinda's life affirming confections, which spoke so simply of love. Her voice shakes like a lamb, but a charming and distinct lamb. She lived a life of drugs and parties at an early age, but transformed into elegance and dazzling beauty. She also reminds me of my sister. There is not a chance she has the talent of Whitney Houston in her glory days, but music is a personal thing, and in my life, vocal perfection was trumped by a voice that spoke directly to me, and all of my yearnings for love, and joy in living.
"No, no... please, what is the name?"
"Belinda Carlisle."
Salvo was stunned. I do not use the term lightly. His eyes were ping pong balls. "No, no... wait... who? No, no... Bay-leeeenda? Bay-leenda Carlaaaa-yle? No... no..." He grabbed my arm, harder than he probably meant to, and whipped his wallet out of his pocket. He flipped through card after card, until he came to one that read, "The Moon: The Italian Fan Club For Belinda Carlisle."
"In Italy, there are only 20 fans of Bayleenda in this club. I go to record stores, and ask for Bayleenda. They don't know Bayleenda. Who is this Bayleenda? No, we don't have. I can not believe to meet you. I have only one friend in the world of Bayleenda. She lives in Venice. She won't believe this. I can't wait to tell her about you. Listen, any friend of Bayleenda, is a friend of mine. You will stay with me and my roommate at the university while you are here."
I spent five days eating mozzarella with tomato and olive oil and basil, breaded pasta, and wine, and wonderful people. One night, Elisabetta walked me down a quiet side street. She held my hand and said "I want to show you something. Bologna used to have many canals made of water, just like in Venice, but now there is just this one." There was a brick wall, and she moved a small square of brick window. "Not many people know this window is here." It opened up to reveal a beautiful street of water glistening under a full moon. Belinda Carlisle's song "La Luna" came to me at that moment. "In the harbor's moonlit water, all the ships were swaying in a dance."
My second day staying with the students, Salvo pulled me aside. His mood was somber. "I have something to tell you. I called my friend of Bayleenda in Venice to tell her about you. Her mother answered the phone. She has just been killed in a car accident. I am so sad right now, but I feel something so spiritual. At the same time I lose my only friend of Bayleenda, you come from nowhere, and I make a friend of Bayleenda."
Well, this is too long, so I will skip the story of meeting Belinda back in America, but she wrote a letter to me, on her own little blue stationery, that told me what a touching story it was, what a strange, small world it is, and that her heart went out to the family and friends of the girl who died. That meant a whole lot to the Italian Fan Club For Belinda Carlisle, which had lost a dear member.
As for me, I long to return, to the fountain, to the university plaza, to the wall with that secret window, and maybe, just maybe, I will find Salvo and Elisabetta, sitting nearby, and welcoming back this wanderer.
Ebert: Ah. Yes. Yes.
“They say you can never be bored by a film shot in your house. In the same way, I can't be bored by a film set in Venice. For example, I wasn't bored by "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," because while it didn't offer Dobermans, it had a car chase”. – Roger Ebert
OMG. The infamous car chase! Yes! That totally saved it from being forgotten; as Venice never needs saving, flooding aside. And should you ever decide to write a journal entry devoted to “The Greatest WTF Moments in Cinema” I can’t think of anything more likely to have inspired it.
Meanwhile, I’ve read this current one several times over now. It’s like looking at pictures in an art book – the really expensive kind that weigh a ton; a limited edition hardbound in leather. The sort you might chance upon while exploring the countless booksellers on Charing Cross Road in London; better still, one down a side street, tucked away like a secret.
It’s been years now, but I used to be an Inker for a small independent Animation Studio in Vancouver called “International Rocketship” run by Marv Newland - hello “Bambi Meets Godzilla”. It was before computers & corporate suits took over the industry and like Venice, when everything was still done by hand. Classical animation, Roger. And boy, those were the days! Showing up sometime before noon and in the clothes you’d partly slept in, navigating past co-workers like a listing Galleon to the studio kitchen where you’d grab a coffee, a chat and a smoke, before plopping down into your chair. And once there, putting on thin white gloves, and finally dipping your brush into a tiny well of black ink as you dived into your work, while overhead, the stereo blasted everything from Billie Holiday to the Sex Pistols. And mingled with it, and the occasional covert opening of a beer by one of guys, all manner of conversation; some politically correct, others not, animators a breed unto themselves. And why you were just as likely to see elements of porn on display at Rocketship as cartoons by Chuck Jones. But I digress…
It’s for having worked there on Gary Larson’s animated “Tales From the Farside” that I’d made enough one year to spend two weeks in Europe: London, Paris, Venice. I’d been to London and Paris twice before, returning again on this occasion to revisit favorite haunts; you’re not the only one guilty of that. It was Venice though, where I spent most of those two weeks and wound-up the happiest.
I’d splurged and booked a room with a view at the Metropole Hotel on the Riva degli Schiavoni; I wanted to wake to the sight of the sea and San Giorgio Maggiore. And in the end, was never there. I was far too busy blissfully exploring and recording for future painting reference, every nook and cranny. I went in May, before schools let out; wanting weather nice enough so I could work outside wherever and without the noise teenagers tend to thoughtlessly make. Which was thankfully the case. And you’re right when you say it’s easier to observe others when they think you’re occupied doing the opposite. There’s no spy so successful as an artist seemingly sketching away.
Remember that couple in Summertime, Mr. & Mrs. McIlhenny? And their counterparts in “If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium?” Seven countries in 18 days and the sort who do that? The musicians at the Gran Caffe Chioggia were suffering the likes of them even in May. I’d see the tail end of it each evening when I showed up – and thus immediately set to work with all the mercy of Ralph Steadman, capturing them in their unknowing absurdity. And then casually wander over to the band, mindful to stay beneath the radar of their boss, to “drop” one of my sketches in their hands before heading back. I didn’t speak Italian very well back then, but I knew by the sound of their laughter that they knew that “I knew” what they’d been thinking, while they played.
Picture cartoons of drunken Germans being dragged off to the Bridge of Sighs.
Venetians are incredibly polite. The perfect ambassadors. Like the masks they’re renowned for in that they conceal a great deal, never letting on, their patience seeming bottomless. At least those who earn their bread in public. They know they live in an open-air museum and their economy is tied to it. But they also have a really wicked sense of humor about it. They’ve had time to develop one. And it gave me subversive delight to share that I understood without having to be told. They rewarded me for it one night by playing “Maria” from West Side Story.
My last night in Venice I arrived early at the café armed with a camcorder. I recorded 4 hrs worth of Jazz. I sat behind the band (better sound) and the waiters for knowing I was leaving, hovered, as if sad to see me go. Seems the band used to pass my sketches around. A fact discovered when one smiled: “I like that body, the feet, yes?” I’d killed an obnoxious tourist and dumped his body in a canal, where others packed in a gondola found it floating feet up; their faces frozen in horror.
I love Venice. I love Venetians. I love fellow brethren and kindred spirits everywhere. I do not however, care too much for seven countries in 18 days and the sort who do that. Confessing as much may mean I’m guilty of posting pretentious muttering, but hope reveals instead that I have gleeful sense of black humor or of reading Fran Lebowitz.
Ebert: At times during the summer Venice contains more tourists than residents. But in January, now...
I go to Chicago and New Orleans for conferences every couple of years. In New Orleans there is a greasy spoon called the New Market Deli a few blocks away from the conference center. There is also a little french deli that has quiche. Every year I go back the waitress remembers me and brings me a po boy and a plate of beans. When I am in Chicago I like to wander through the theater district as the shows are emptying. This last time I caught a show, but really it is just to feel part of the crowd as it spills out in the cold.
Roger,
I had occasion to travel to London on business in 1999. The only time I've traveled abroad without my wife and/or kids. A Bank Holiday fell during my stay, and with all business shut I had four days to simply wander that city alone. I've since felt a little ashamed that those were four of the best days of my adult life. Reading your blog helped ease that shame a bit. Thank you.
On my few international travels, I almost invariably manage to find myself separated from family or tour group, just so I can wander the city at night. Sometimes, like in St. Petersburg where we were adopting our darling boy, I could find my way back within the hour. Other times, I'd jump off the metro far from my hotel stop and try to find my way back, wasting time perhaps at a Video game parlor in Paris, before finally depending on the kindness of strangers (or the police) to help me get back where I needed to be.
I also had a thing for awhile about walking up whatever tall monument a town could provide me: the first deck of the Eiffel Tower, Atlanta's Stone Mountain, or the Schloßberg in Gräz (where I had the surreal experience of seeing "The Great Dictator" for the first time, in a revival house, dubbed into German: when Chaplin's barber character sees the word "Jews" grafitti'ed all over his neighborhood, he says, instead, "Juden?"). That college-time trip also involved a side trip to Venice, where I, not knowing what I was supposed to see, just walked all over the place, finding myself around midnight singing with an international assemblage of students in the square, before taking the last train out to the mainland Mestre station and sleeping on the platform until my return train arrived. Yeah, that was the 70's; I was even able to sleep in the main terminal at JFK before the plane out.
How nice, Roger, that you can backtrack along the spots you discovered back in your youth. Though I had many chances to stop and enjoy a snack along the local boulevard, I will never for the life of me remember them. Better now that I can just map out the local brewpubs at my next destination, and be able to soak up some vestige of local ambiance and where the guy who serves my beer is the guy who made it.
I would like to hear more about sailing up the east coast of Africa -- I bet there's a good story or two in there...
In response to my comment http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/01/theres_a_small_cafe.html#comment-599336
Yes, as a matter of fact I made sure to visit Leighton House, the only possible winner if they ever make a "Most Random Use of an Arabic Hall in an Otherwise Western House" award.
I really do believe it is our civic duty to spread the word on these little hidden gems in London (in this case; whichever it is the city one has lived in) for the enjoyment of others. Not many people know that Ronnie Scott's famous Soho jazz club got a full makeover last year, or to look for Scoop's ice cream in Covent Garden, and so on and so forth...
Perhaps the most wonderful element of Venice is the almost complete lack of the sound of internal combustion engines. I never realized how much the low thrum of engines and gravely crunch of the wheels of moving vehicles dominates our urban lives until you go somewhere urban that lacks it. I recall sleeping wonderfully in Venice- with open windows. One is only stirred from sleep by the sounds of cooing pigeons, human voices and light commerce (clattering food trays, cash registers, murmuring tourists) which seems so much more humane. Venice makes me understand what mechanization has robbed from us.
I'm the commenter who posted the message above about the readership being self-involved. I think, Roger, you misunderstood my message; I wasn't calling your readers philistines, I was claiming that they think of all others (besides their exalted lot) as philistines, and never miss an opportunity to say so. Read down the posts and see if I'm not right, on just about every other post. And it's been worse in many other threads.
I'd also wager that most are rather affluent, and this does matter.
Case in point, from a post above by Marie Haws:
"A fact discovered when one smiled: “I like that body, the feet, yes?” I’d killed an obnoxious tourist and dumped his body in a canal, where others packed in a gondola found it floating feet up; their faces frozen in horror."
Ah, such droll wit. My problem; are "tourists" not damned if they do, damned if they don't? They're lambasted for being provincial and intellectually incurious if they don't visit the sophisticated citadels of Europe, but, once there, are deemed "not good enough" by the tres fabulous "artists" such as Ms. Haws. Deciding between the "good" tourists and "bad" tourists seems to me to be an execrable, us vs. them attitude based largely, though it will never be admitted, on class.
Ebert: I think Marie Haws was being funny. That's what cartoonists do. The musicians agreed with her. I have seen a lot of obnoxious tourists, and believe me, it has nothing to do with class. If they have enough money to be tourists, they gotta take their changes with my value judgments.
I’ve never been to Venice but I hope to one day. I also wish to visit a lot of places but its never been the right time or its an money issue.. I went to France and Germany last april but I did not enjoy my time at all. Majority of the people would image Paris to be a “magical place” but it was such a disappointment for me. It wasn’t magical at all. Mainly I think its because the whole trip itself ruined it. It was a school trip, and for the money I paid for (ok not really, my parents paid for it) it was a waste. If I can do it again, I would visit France and Germany with people I love and maybe form some good memories from the trip, etc. Traveling is such a good activity, just for kids to get exposed to the world. The world is soo big, you’ll never get to see EVERYTHING (I still want to try though) but its good to learn about other places and compare it back to where you live.
I also went to Bermuda. I recommend everyone to visit there, once in their life time. It is the most beautiful place I’ve ever gone in my 17 years of life..hehehehe The water is amazing.. I’ve never seen such clean water (I live in boston and the water in the Charles River is lethal, I don’t think any living creature can survive). It just amazed me that I can swim with animals. I saw schools of fishes, fishes bigger than my hand, and others smaller than my finger. My favorite part of the trip was snorkeling. It was exactly what I expected. It was like watching the national geographic or “Finding Nemo”. Able to see fishes live the way they were made was such a pleasure.
(My next adventure is to swim with killer whales in Sea World if they don’t eat me alive. God knows when’s this is going to happen. It silly but I’ve always loved sea creatures. I think I was a mermaid in my past life, at least that’s what I like to believe)
I’ve been to more places (Quebec, Toronto, San Diego, San Francisco, Cape Cod, Maine, New York, New Jersey) but never even think about it unless I think deep in my mind. I guess its because I never have as much fun as I expect to. That’s why when I think of vacation.. the first thing that pops in my head is Bermuda.
10 or 20 years from now, my goal is to visit a lot more places and form a lot more good memories like you!
Thanks for reading.
Fantastic posts from one and all here have brought back wonderful memories and remind me of the joy of travel and exploration. As someone who recently relocated to Toronto I am excited by all the suggestions.
Roger you will be pleased to know Cadbury-Adams has announced they will start producing Black Jack, Beemans and Clove gum in May of 2009! They produce it every few years for the nostalgia markets.
The fact that the musicians agreed with her is exactly my point. The conspiratorial air of "we're better than them"
But fair enough, you win. Marie Haws is a blindingly brilliant cartoonist, and there is no such thing as unfounded snobbery, just obvious superiority. Be well.
Your passage from Two Weeks in the Midday Sun, in which you describe being "suddenly ... filled with an enormous happiness" compels me to join the quoters--and to return to W.B. Yeats, in "Vacillation":
My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.
Two weeks ago you invoked Yeats to describe Armageddon; today, it's the ecstasy of solitary happiness.
Speaking of solitary happiness, I finally saw Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World, and between that dedicated-to-Ebert film and your essay, all I can say is that we should all be so lucky to be deranged penguins, wandering off on our blessed own.
Ebert: It's uncanny, the way Yeats described my own experience.
Surely you mean Dick Whittington's cat?
Ebert: Surely I do!
Another famous London cat statue stands before Dr. Johnson's House:
http://www.britishtours.com/360/drjohnson.html
I am fairly young and expecting my first child on the way, and so my traveling days will be on hiatus. Yet your passage here puts words to why I have always felt the need to be somewhere else.
I have been to Mexico twice, and not cancun...which I consider to be "Americo". No, I mean mexico, south, down in the mountains, where every morning you can here the women grinding out corn for tortillas, where you can here the sounds from the water and natural gas trucks driving around the towns, where a man with a guitar is the most popular thing at night, where a shot of tequila is always free if you have a smile.
I could live there forever, cold fog off the mountains in the morning, no electronic noises, very few cars, and the smell of fresh bread 24/7. Playing dominos in a cafe with a man who I can't understand and who could be well into his 2nd century of living.
I'm only 30 and I know that there are WAY too many places out there for me to ever see. I will take solace in the idea that there are then, also, too many places for me to have been and heartachingly miss.
Ebert: Better to really be in a place than fleetingly be in a lot of them.
I noticed you updated your "Lino" pic with the one I tweaked for you. However it seems to have gotten a little too dark through it's passage through cyberspace! At the risk of being a pest, though I'd offer you ANOTHER (brighter) version, here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/-i_WllMhiX05tz2OhyiFzA?feat=directlink
No need to post this as another comment; just didn't know where else to reach you...
Love the journal,
Scott
Ebert: Thanks again! Looks better now.
Hi, Roger! I hope you're doing well after your operation. I've discovered your writing only very recently, and I really admire you as a thinker and as a human being. Thank you for all your wonderful work. I've given your site the Dardos award. Thanks!
http://gatochy.blogspot.com/2009/01/smashing-200.html
Ebert: I accept with pleasure!
Walking around foreign cities, even getting lost in them, is one of my favorite experiences. It does somehow ground me in myself, help me understand who I am and who I am not, and how we are all so different and the same. Without fail, I meet wonderful people on these walks. In Angers, France, a sandwich stand owner tried to help me with my French one day, in a way that was remarkably patient and kind. I went back to his stand every day after that during my semester abroad, and every day he illustrated a new vocabulary word for me, and smiled delightedly if I remembered yesterday's word. In Egypt, I got lost somewhere in the endless web of Cairo's Khan al Khalili bazaar, far past the outskirts where the tourists usually are, and was standing outside a shop being stared at by a group of local children. One young girl in Muslim dress, who looked to be about 12, eventually made her way over to me. "Hello, how are you?" she asked in thickly accented English. I told her that I was fine, thank you, and she used one of the other phrases she knew, "What is your name?" I told her, and asked for her name in return, to which she replied, "Very well, thank you." It was clear we had reached the end of her English, which sadly outpaced my Arabic, so we stood there for a moment, smiling at one another. I was so impressed with her curiosity and the courage to back it up, to reach out to a foreigner in a world where too many people rely on their assumptions and keep their distance instead. After a moment, she reached out her hand, and I shook it. "Thank you," I said, and meant it. I don't know if she remembers the strange American woman in the marketplace that day, but I will always remember her. There are probably many travel stories like this that we could all tell. Thank you for sharing yours so beautifully, Mr. Ebert, and inspiring your readers to do the same. It is possibly my favorite of your posts so far, and that is saying a lot.
Ebert: I think it may be my favorite too, and the comments are so very good.
Ebert: I was alone at a table in a square where no one I knew was likely to come, in a land where I did not speak the language, in a place where, for the moment, I could not be found. I was like a spirit returned from another world. All the people around me carried on their lives, sold their strawberries and called for their children, and my presence there made not the slightest difference to them. I was invisible.
but herein lies a paradox, maybe a catch-22. most people think about achieving something to gain notoriety, a taste of fame, or at least something by which to be remembered. you have already accomplished that, much more greatly in my book than the dime-a-dozen actors whom you cover. what if you were not in the realm of celebrity? would you still want to be invisible? people like me, the invisibles, we sit at that same table and wish there was a reason someone might walk by and say, "hey, don't i know you?"
Ebert: Don't get me wrong. Because of TV, I have met a lot of great people, and very few unpleasant ones. I'm talking however about the positive side of invisibility.
I'm happiest when I'm by myself. I've always been like that, I
guess I always will. My Grandma says my mother is like that.
But, for me, being alone isn't as easy as it sounds.
I have to be fed, bath roomed, carried, pushed, dressed, undressed,
showered, toweled off, lifted, and assisted every day
just to survive. Luckily for me, I live where there are plenty of
deserted roads. I can get in my electric wheelchair and just go. I
could be gone for over an hour.
And when I come back I always feel better.
Ebert: I just want to say I read this and was moved by your words.
I just wish i could roam the world
Hi Roger -
I've been reading your blog for quite a while, and your reviews and essays since I first decided to become a filmmaker. I lived in Italy for a while during college, and have taken many trips to Venice. Even in the summer, it's possible to walk far off the beaten trail and avoid the tourists just looking to check San Marco off their to-do list before moving on to Florence. It's a city that melts my heart no matter how many times I return. Nothing in life is better than getting lost in the winding paths, only to dead-end at a canal and have to figure out a new way to go.
I love wandering and taking in my surroundings, which might explain why I became a film location scout in New York City. I see so many interesting and hidden aspects of the city in my travels that I've started a blog to keep a record of it all. I really hope this doesn't come off as a shameless plug - I only post it because I think you might enjoy it - www.scoutingny.com. (PLEASE delete this if it comes off as shameless).
Best,
Scout
Ebert: One interesting area is the far bank of the Giudecca. The day-tourists arrive by bus or rail at the train station, pile onto vaporettos, head for San Marco, and walk to the Rialto, just as you describe. If you walk away from their path, you will still encounter tourists, but many fewer, and in general more interesting--just as you are! After all, as tourists, we don't want there to be no tourists. That would be like the guy who shouted: "Clear the bar! I want to drink by myself!"
Beautiful, roger.
This reminds me of a place I often go to with my family, and that is the San Antonio Riverwalk. Most of my extended family lives in Texas, and most of them live in san antonio, so to say I've seen the Alamo too many damn times is an understatement. It's basically a part of the city where they dammed the San Antonio River back in the 20's to keep it from flooding, so essentially the river is self contained. It's a nice little strip through town that has some of the best restaurants in the world, and tons of little hiding places and cobblestone paths along the way. I remember when I was young, I was afraid that there were sharks in the river. I took a boat tour and the tour guide assuaged me that they couldn't get in the river since the ocean didn't connect to it.
Ironically, my favorite time to go is in January, when they drain the river for 10 days in order to clean it. The tour guide told us that the number 1 thing dropped in the river is silverware from the various restaurants. I remember when I was there the day that they drained it, and as the water receded, hundreds of utensils poked up from the sand at the bottom, along with sunglasses, cameras, maps, garbage, jewelry, and in one instance, a complete purse, with cell phone and wallet still inside.
The last time I was there was about two and a half years ago, when my grandfather turned 70. I remember it because it was the last time I saw my grandmother as a coherent individual before Alzheimer's took her. I remember because I had my first full drink and it was a surprise party, so my grandpa came into the restaurant and his face just lit up, like I had never seen before. It was also the last time I saw my grandpa as a minor, and the next summer, when he road tripped up to Chicago for a summer trip, we smoked cigarettes on the back porch and he told me about my grandma's worsening, and about how so many things were about to change in his life, and it was the first time I ever saw my grandpa as anything except a comforting authority figure.
For some reason, the memory of his birthday has stuck with me, especially that night with my grandpa, and the day of my grandmother's funeral, when I saw numerous members of my extended family cry for the first time. When I turn 21 in June, I will most likely go to the riverwalk for my 21st birthday and spend the night drinking margaritas with my friends, but the next day, I want to do something to commemorate the place. Maybe I will throw an object in the river. Maybe I'll just sit and think. Maybe I'll walk down the cobblestone path that leads to the mall around the corner. But I feel like I should do something meaningful, because it is one of the few places outside of my hometown that I feel strong emotional bonds towards.
Ebert: I love to walk along the south back of the Chicago River east of Michigan av., then under Lake Shore Drive, then up beside the harbor and back through Grant Park. Usually there are only a few joggers.
I know there are dozens of little bridges on tiny side streets in Venice, and many of them must be next to cafes, but I can't help but wonder if you and I have sat in the very same chair.
http://looky.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/venice137.jpg
Venice is the most beautiful city in the world (that I've seen so far), but I am sometimes filled with sadness when I think of it, because I'm not sure at all that I'll see it again.
Ebert: That's not the same cafe--but it's better! It's Lino's Trattoria alla Rivetta itself!
Mr. Ebert,
I very much enjoyed reading about the way you go back and visit your “bases”. I was pleasantly surprised when you described the very same London walk that my wife and I take each month. We moved to London from the United States two years ago and fortunately stumbled upon Highgate when we were looking for a place to rent a flat. We instantly fell in love with this area of North London and spend many weekends on the same walk that you describe from Parliament Hill all the way down to Archway. The top of Parliament Hill is one of my favorite places in the world.
The first flat we lived in was the converted church on the corner of Cromwell and Highgate High Street—just up the hill from the statue of Whittington’s Cat. We now live in nearby Muswell Hill—another wonderful North London neighborhood.
We are only going to live in London for a few years before moving home and cherish each moment that we can spend wondering the streets and neighborhoods. I have no doubt that in years to come we will return every once in awhile to retrace the paths we have walked and visit these places that are so familiar and important to us now.
Thank you.
Ebert: I have actually been to dinner a few times in a friend's flat in the same church. Is the Fisher & Sperr used book store still on the High Street?
Mr. Ebert... thank you so much for linking up to my photo of the beautiful Arthur Caldwell Lilly Pond in a recent reply. (Ebert: I love the prairie-style shelter overlooking the Alfred Caldwell Lily Pad reached via the little gate at the North End of the Lincoln Park Zoo, or via Fullerton Parkway.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rcktmanil/2522051880/) I noticed the "hits" on that photo jumped up yesterday, and when it linked back to your blog, I was so honored. I've always been a big fan of yours, and admire your writing style so much. As a fellow blogger (whenever I get the will, lately,) I am enjoying reading your foray into the medium.
As for the Lilly Pond, a friend and I had decided to take a photo excursion through Lincoln Park last spring. Each of us armed with new cameras we had acquired the previous Christmas, we were eager to get out and shoot some outdoor scenery. We started at Montrose Harbor at the Bird Sanctuary and worked our way down, from Belmont Harbor with the Waveland Fieldhouse to the Lincoln Park Lagoon. Finally, as we reached Fullerton Avenue, we practically stumbled upon the Arthur Caldwell Lily Pond, the tranquil spot next to the Lincoln Park Zoo that neither of us had ever seen before.
I remember being struck by the tranquilness of the space. Here, in the middle of a major city, just off of a busy street, was this quiet, solemn place, where ducks swam quietly and wildflowers bloomed. Even though I was tired from walking all day, I couldn't help but explore this new spot... well, new to me.
It was a moment where I realized how very much there is in this city alone that I have never seen... all I have to do is go out there and explore it and find more treasures.
Ebert: Yours was by far the best photo I found in a Google image search. You'd be amazed how many people have posted photos that do NOT show the little shelter. I have walked around the pond many, many times, and rarely find more than a few people there; often I've been alone. Every spring there are ducklings.
David Van Dyke wrote: "Let me add another comment to Bob: Give yourself more credit. The fact that you would save up enough money to go to Iceland and Japan tells me you are a class act of the first order. I'd bet you use your library and see foreign movies, too. :) "
Thanks for the kind words. Iceland is actually easy to get to if you live on the east coast. The airfare is cheap, although some things are expensive once you're there. If you live in the Northeast, however, it probably costs the same to spend a week in Iceland as San Francisco (with a similar flight time), and you get to see a land full of lush canyons, jagged mountains, black rock like the surface of the moon as far as the eye can see, hundreds of waterfalls, an eclectic array of birds, massive glaciers, bright blue icebergs, and vast, vacant beaches. And Reykjavik itself has some old world charm but is very modern, with sophisticated notions of art, fashion, and architecture in that good Scandinavian way.
I haven't been using my library card lately but have been working through a stack of books, which can be a form of traveling I suppose. I'm currently reading "The Crow Road" by Iain Banks, and it's one of those novels that takes you deep inside a specific place (in this case Scotland) and doesn't hold your hand — basically letting you explore on your own, teaching you about it while telling a terrific, generation-spanning tale.
"Half an hour after I'd left Darren's post-post-modernist concrete block I stood in the dusk light beneath the dun on the hill of Bac Chrom, within sight of the track at last, the lights of Slockavullin village beneath me, the eastern edge of the Gallanach a thin grid of orange sparks to my right, the main road to Oban and the north busy with lights of white and orange and red, and the dark landscape below full of soft undulations, littered with chambered cairns, cup and ring marked rocks, standing stones, tumuli and ancient forts.
All the gods are false, I thought. Faith itself is idolatry.
I looked into that ancient, cluttered darkness, wondering."
While in Venice did you see the streets where they filmed "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen"? ;)
I've been to London six times, and I have my favorite spots which I visit every time I'm there. When I go to London again, I will visit some of your favorite places. I've only been to Venice once, in spring, and my favorite memory is sitting in what once was a church listening to a string quartet play Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" - a marvelous experience.
If people ask me for advice when visiting Paris, I tell them to walk. Everywhere. Mark Twain had the right idea.
How fortuitous. The spouse and I depart for Italy tomorrow for 3+ weeks. I shall think of you as we conclude our trip in Venice at the end of the month. First trip there that will occur in winter and I am so looking forward to it.
Thank you for the lovely picture(s) you have painted and for the reminder to unearth my Tilley.
Ebert: I note that my Tilley is crushed under my arm in the photo with Lino. As they say on the label, "Put it in your will."
Roger,
you may just have inspired me to go visit Venice sometime in the next two weeks or so. I live in the south of Austria, so it's only 3 hours by train, but somehow I never go. A day of aimless wandering can do some good to the spirit.
Ebert: A nice rail journey, too.
My wife and I fell in love with Venice. We visited the casino, where--and I guess all men must do this--I imagined myself as James Bond; except that 007 probably never slunk out of the room after dropping @12 on the slots. But it is a small world. When I wear a baseball cap, I resemble the former pitcher, Frank Viola. At one point while waiting for a gondola, a fellow traveler approached me, said he was from Boston, and asked me if I had once pitched for the Red Sox. So I find it hard to believe that there are places in the world where people don't recognize you.
Once, during a walk in the English Lake district, after noticing a host of daffodils, I quoted Wordsworth to my older sister. Later that day as we ate our hosteller's lunch of cheese and bread in the door of an old building, I noticed that we were sitting on the stoop of the post office where Wordsworth once worked. That was a very good day!
Ebert,
10 years ago my wife and I read your Perfect London Walk. We read it and had no idea that open spaces were so near that great city. It was packed for our next trip and we enjoyed a wonderful walk as a result, ending at The Spaniard and a pleasant lunch. Thank you for making it possible.
We did see a memorial bench to Daniel Curley on the Heath. How fitting.
I must confess your musings on people and places are even more pleasurable than your reviews, which I enjoy!
Take care,
Bill
Bob: My pleasure. I am a teacher and I HATE it when I hear my students label themselves like that.
I'm always on the lookout for good books, so maybe I will give "The Crow Road" a try. My wife and I discovered the Adrian Mole books (by Sue Townsend) in London the first time we were there. The series started as a book for adolescents but kind of developed into one of the funniest series we have ever enjoyed. I got some of my students hooked unto them as well.
Aaron: I'm not the least bit affluent and I would bet a Sunday dinner other posters here would not describe themselves as such. I should have written "...and saved up every penny to do so" after listing the places I've visited.
As to American tourists being obnoxious: The reputation is well-earned. I would not write this were I not an American myself. Imagine how you would respond if a French-speaking (or Spanish speaking, etc..) visitor refused to even TRY English if they were to visit here?
There is a Holocaust memorial outside Notre Dame in which I've seen other Americans enter while keeping their baseball caps
on. Americans defaced the graves around Jim Morrison's at Père Lachaise. Speaking of the Lizard King's resting place, it embarasses me that my countrymen and women visit his grave and ignore Chopin's, Moliere's, Oscar Wilde's, Maria Callas', etc..
Since I wrote about my embarassment at American behavior in Paris, let me counter it with this: My heart swelled with pride when I crossed Franklin Delano Roosevelt Avenue (Avenue?) from the Champs-Élysées.
I live in Vienna, Austria, and wanted to know if you've ever been there?
MtA Chr.
Ebert: Twice. A magnificent city. It will always be haunted by images from "The Third Man," one of my favorite films.
I don't travel a lot. I take a vacation once every other year if I'm lucky. Believe it or not my favorite moments of solitude take place at the movie theater. I love to go by myself. I sit about twice as far back from the screen as the screen is tall. True, there are movies that require the group experience but there are those that I need to see by myself because I can be alone (for lack of a better term) with the film.
Recently, I saw "Rachel Getting Married", a great film, one of those films with a story that you kind of fall into. Right now is my favorite time of the year, when it's Oscar season and I am seeing films my friends couldn't care less about so I get my little moments of cinematic solitude. I live for it.
So Lino was there inside all the while that I sat outside sketching. What a lovely thought.
Dear Roger and between us;
Oops! I didn't notice Aaron's rebuttal on Jan 12th, 2009 3:09 pm! Too distracted by brushstrokes in another post, full of lovely memories. Making me laugh now at mine for it being submitted after his - thus unnecessary and ergo wasted effort; ie: HUGE moot point! He's done making his. That penny dropping after looking to see if I'd been able to get mine across.
Hopefully, you got to know me a little better, at least! I may like to spar & play occasionally with words, but there's absolutely no malice behind them in my heart. I like throwing snowballs, not tossing knives. And why I draw cartoons instead. :)
Mr. Ebert, sir--you have led the richest of lives. I hope it continues for a long while.
I wish I could have traveled even 1/100 of your journeys. Maybe someday, perhaps when I'm alone.
Thank you for this piece.
Quite inspired by this post, Mr. Ebert.
Do you have any "bases" that you'd like to reveal in the San Francisco Bay Area?
Thanks again.
CR
Ebert: City Lights bookstore, of course.
This is unrelated to the post's topic, but I wanted to ask the actual source if this is really you:
http://twitter.com/realrogerebert
Ebert: Not me. Don't you sort of suspect that?
"Wherein I spake of most disastrous chances,
Of moving accidents by flood and field
Of hair-breadth scapes i' the imminent deadly breach,
Of being taken by the insolent foe
And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence
And portance in my travels' history:
Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,
Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven
It was my hint to speak,--such was the process;
And of the Cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders"
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
Not sure if you're familiar with Eureka Springs, Arkansas. It's a little tourist trap of a Victorian town nestled in a corner of the Ozarks. At one time people would travel there to get "cured" by the supposedly magical spring waters found in the vicinity. Today you can still walk from spring to spring, and drink from fountains set up by the springs, but all of the fountains now sport city tap water, and the only benefits you get from visiting the springs are from the walk itself. The downtown business district is made up of 1890's/early 1900's architecture, and there are little restaurants, clubs, hotels, and b&b's hidden throughout.
I've traveled there myself fairly regularly since the mid-1980's. For many years, I've made trips there running as short as a day, and as long as a week, to basically just get away and lose myself. I bypass the cornpone music shows, and the gift shops that sell "Ozark Fly Swatters" and the like, and hang out downtown. For the first few years, there was a little Chinese restaurant located just to the east of Basin Park. You had to walk past a shop on the lower level, climb a flight of rickety stairs, and enter in through a screen door. I was there probably two dozen times, and never remember another customer in there. The same guy always waited on me; I always ordered orange beef with a side of crab wontons, and a hot tea. I always sat by the window overlooking the park and would sit there watching the tourists walking by, or a band on the stage performing, or the traffic.
The last time I went to visit, there was a chain blocking the staircase. The restaurant is long gone now, and I've never seen that waiter anywhere.
I'm not sure what makes me more nostalgic, the memories from visiting that place, or the knowledge that I can never visit there again. I've found other places to dine and relax in Eureka Springs, but none have the same vantage point of Basin Park.
Ebert: Franchise food is driving out such havens. Whenever possible, I prefer to eat in real restaurants owned by people on the premises.
Did you ever think of asking the counter person at McDonald's, "What looks good today?"
Dear Mr. Ebert,
Travel certainly is a wonderful, mind-broadening experience. And just as I love to replay a favourite movie when the situation calls, returning to where I feel that I've connected with the spirit of a place (such as that quiet hilltop overlooking Lake Titicaca near Copacabana, Bolivia), is all the better.
Salman Rushdie is right I think when he says that places only yield up their secrets, their most profound mysteries, to those who are just passing through.
Ebert: Hadn't heard that Rushdie quote, but he's correct. I our own lives, we're always Lewis and Clark.
With very best wishes,
Trevor
Dear Mr. Ebert, While I understand about visiting sites to touch our past I find the opposite is sometimes true. I find myself avoiding places, sites, restaurants, and even chairs because the memories associated with them are either too precious.. or too painful to tamper with again. The original can never be duplicated, certainly could never be outdone, so why visit to see how time has ravaged both the place and my heart? Isn't it best just to let sleeping dogs lie? Isn't it best to let some golden memories stay untarnished by time? You are a far braver person than I. Or perhaps I am simply making my world a much smaller place by chopping off big parts of it never to return.
Dear Mr Ebert,
Have you ever visited Trinidad? It is, as you well know, the birthplace of the writer VS Naipaul. Incidentally, last year, at the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival, there was a tribute to Naipaul on the occasion of his 75th birthday. One of the films shown was the Merchant Ivory production of his novel the Mystic Masseur. I wrote the programme notes for the film, and quoted from your wonderful review of it. Thank you for that, for this essay, and indeed for everything you write.
Very best regards,
Jonathan
Ebert: I have, and found it beautiful and filled with life. I think Naipaul's A House for Mister Biswas is one of the great novels of the century.
This is all very good counterpoint to Kerouac's advice to "never get drunk outside yr own home"...
Dave:
You're so right! I, for one, am not wealthy. It took me years to save for my big trip to Scotland. Of course, much of the world would consider me rich - I'm an American, and we are a rich people.
I have a friend who moved to the US from the Soviet Union many years ago. She was from the upper classes there - her father was one of the intelligentsia, a biggish mucky-muck. I was an American from the lower middle classes, the first in my extended family to go to college, for instance.
One day, we discussed the things our families had when we were children. Her family had a nice big apartment in Moscow, and a dacha in the country. She did not have a car. Because of her family's status, she was given a very good education and important people were regular visitors to her home. My family owned its own house, which was small, but bigger than her apartment. We had a big yard. We had a car, though it was used. We had a big boat, though it was handbuilt by my Dad, and we scraped together the money to rent a dock at a local lake. I got a good education because I worked hard for a scholarship. We did not have a dacha in the country and important people didn't visit our home. On the whole, though, we had a lot more than she did. Wealth is such a relative concept.
(We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming. ;-)
I finally watched "In Bruges" last night, after Colin Farrell won the Globe but coincidentally before I read this post. I found it nicely poignant and quite hilarious, especially since I've actually been to Bruges. Although I lean towards the Brendan Gleeson point of view about the place (and tourism in general), there's a little bit of the Farrell side in me wondering what all the fuss is about.
Your latest entry makes me want to browse through my old paperback of Michael Crichton's "Travels" and daydream of inner and outer places I'll hopefully visit myself someday.
The term "old familiar places" means something different after globalization, unfortunately, so my bases are not as poetic as yours. What matters is, they mean something to me.
They include: Union Square Park, New York. Cleopatra's Needle in Central Park, New York. Galco's Soda Store, Los Angeles. Quincy Market, Boston. Grand Place, Brussels. The whole beach in Cabarete, D.R. The Art Deco district in South Beach, FL.
I need to book me a vacation somewhere old and new.
I was so sad when I got to the end of this thread! I enjoyed everyone's stories, as much as the original post. At 32, I'm about to leave the country for the first time this summer, to visit Barcelona; as I'm accompanying my boyfriend on a business trip, I will indeed be fortunate enough to have alone time. Now, thanks to all these inspiring words, my first priority will be to get lost with a sketchbook.
So many discussions of walking and seeing--and seeing movies--suddenly put me in mind of my favorite film about the loss of a good walk followed by the quiet comfort of a corner: Jacques Tati's Play Time, in which he sets M.Hulot loose into a void-Paris, where little remains but cold geometry. You write that Tati's "film is about how humans wander baffled and yet hopeful through impersonal cities and sterile architecture." And the American tourist at the end, remembering Paris--and Hulot--lets the impersonal glass and concrete slip away, and starts almost immediately to turn her trip into a pleasant memory, like the ones you and your commenters have been sharing. Just wanted to thank all of you.
Wow. I, like an earlier reader, just discvered your blog (this after being an avid reader of your reviews for sometime), and am amazed and love to hear about the wanderings of fellow travelers. I am lucky to have had the opportunity to travel a bit, and wander aimlessly at times. To me, any Italian city is great to get lost in. I had a chance to spend a month backpacking in Eurpoe after graduating college. I was with my girlfriend at the time, and we made it into Italy, and Rome. Being of Italian ancestry and a history major, I was in awe of this city. We spent a day between the Sistine Chapel, the Spanish Steps, and the Forum But we also walked a little on the outskirts, going to some ancient catacombs, and just roaming the town. I remember it with great fondness. The best part of that day was having dinner and a bottle of wine as the sun set at a restaurant across from the Coliseum. It is amazing how content one can feel in a city that you had not been to, and do not speak the same language as the people around you. Whether it be the canals of Venice, getting caught in a French train strike (in Nice, lucky us), or solitude of waking up early to see the sunrise on the beach, I find it exciting to remember, and sad that it is in the past, and believe that returning to these places creates more excitement to see how the now compares to the then. I hope to be able to make those comparisons down the road.
Anyway, thank you for sharing your thoughts Mr. Ebert, it was a true pleasure.
Actually I did, but I remained neutral on the off chance it was you.
Since Twitter has a policy of disallowing users to use photos of celebrities as their profile pictures, this person is technically in violation of Twitter's published policy.
From http://twitter.com/account/picture (available only when logged in):
“Be sure you have permission to use the photo you're using. (And don't use a celebrity's picture -- unless you're that celebrity, of course.)”
Ebert: Not just technically. Blatantly! I look forward to learnimg in the blogosphere that I have only recently actually seen "Citizen Kane> :)
Dear Mr. Ebert,
In the last year or so, many of your pieces have been so nostalgic that I thought you were beginning to sound like my Grandma Mary when she hit 80 years old, that is, as if she were going to pass away the next day. So I'll tell you what the priest used to tell her every Sunday when he brought the host to her home when she became too frail to make it to church: "You're going to live past 100, Mary, so we can enjoy you and your stories."
He was right. She died in 1990 at the age of 101 and we still relish talking about her stories and antics (like the way she "inverted" her age during the last decade of her life, ie, when she was 91 she said she was 19, etc. And how she deftly handled my uncle's question, "What you going to do when you hit 99, Ma?" by saying: "I'll flip it over and be 66.")
May you live even longer that my Grandma Mary, Roger Ebert, so that I can enjoy your reviews and, as of late, these beautiful, nostalgic pieces about your past and the many enchanting cities and countries I'll never have the luxury to see in person, but can still enjoy by reading your work.
I know you're terribly busy and not technically a travel writer, but it would be wonderful if you could share a few sentences about your trip up the east coast of Africa from Capetown to Venice. What kind of vessel was the Europa? Did you work on the boat or were you simply a passenger? Any interesting ports of call/visits to the coast? God bless!
Ebert: It wasn't a cruise vessel but a passenger and mail ship. No elevators, just staircases. A little band played after dinner when they pushed back the tables in the dining room. Groaning platters of Italian food. Lots of South African Muslims on board, making the pilgramage to Mecca. We made every major port city on the way. Seasickness in the winter Mediterranean. Cheaper than air. Up the west coast of Africa, Union Castle ships made the voyage to Europe, but it was a longer distance. On our passage we met the sister ship, the Lloyd Tristino Africa. Two ships passing in the night.
"I would reply that, by looking at one thing, you can surmise ten thousand. This is what is meant by the statement that you can come to know all under heaven without ever going out of your garden gate. But a fool will have doubts, saying, “I have seen the sky in the south, but I have not seen the sky in the east or west or north. Perhaps the sky in those other three directions has a different sun in it from the one I know.” Or he will see a column of smoke rising up beyond the hills, and although the smoke is in plain sight, because he cannot see the fire itself, he will conclude that the fire may not really exist. Such a person is my questioner..... or person of incorrigible disbelief, no different from a man with sightless eyes!"
Nichiren Daishonin(1222-1281)
I have my own rituals. My favorite involves a city bus and retracing my route to high school. I arrive at the school, buy a chicken cutlet sandwich from Kenny in the truck across the street, and go home again. No need to enter the school itself; most of the teachers don't even remember I took their classes, but Kenny still remembers my order.
Well, he did. Sadly, this ritual has brought me less and less satisfaction. The sandwich isn't what it used to be, and the price has gone up. Kenny doesn't recognize me as well anymore. I feel a greater and greater distance from the experience. I have been here before, I am here now, but I don't know if I will be again.
I don't have any rituals anymore and understand how important they are. I don't have much to commemorate and few opportunities to do so. But hopefully I'll be lucky enough that in forty years I'll have some that involve London and Venice.
I know exactly the feeling you're describing. Well, almost. It's simply a matter of being young: I've been to some wonderful places where I've had beautiful moments of introspection and joy, but I have not yet been able to return to them. And yet I can still describe them to people who are willing (and sometimes unwilling) to listen. I've found being so far away from your "real life" makes you feel refreshingly small and unimportant. It keeps your ego in check. It's my belief that travel is less about discovering new places than discovering new parts of yourself, or even reevaluating old ones.
And I have to remember to pick up that book of yours for the next time I'm traveling.
This is my favorite blog entry of yours that I've read so far (although I will admit that I've been keeping up with them only fairly recently). I can relate so well! I (a college student) studied in wonderful Galway, Ireland for the spring '08 semester. It was, as someone once said, "the culmination of years of dreams." It had taken me two years to save up enough money for the great experience, but oh did I ever get my money's worth out of it! Here's the list of the places a gal from a humble little MN town got to finally see and experience for herself: Ireland, N. Ireland, London, Paris, Venice, Croatia, Egypt, and Turkey.
Ah, those quiet little moments when you are alone and travelling and enjoying every moment to its fullest! In Galway few things compare to walking on this one path by the Corrib River. You pass little stretches of trees wrapped in vines and wide swathes of reeds, and if you are like me you are humming a tune that you heard at a traditional music session at one of the Galway's finest pubs. You come round a perfectly ordinary bend in the path to see a castle away on the other side of the river, reflecting in the water where a pair of swans are gliding. You are alone--even the rowing clubs haven't gone by in awhile--and you look at the castle and think, this is what I wanted and was hoping for. This is my Ireland.
I understand your love for London, too, having travelled there last April and seen every sight you could see in three brief days while still having time to spare for plenty of aimless happy wandering. Silly moments happened--such as when I was caught in a drenching rain and ran to take shelter by the doorway of the Ritz. Leaning against the side of one of the most prestigious hotels in London, or Europe for that matter, I decided that I might as well take the opportunity to change into fresher socks (which were badly needed). And there are memories that are very sweet. One of my favorite places to walk in London is through Kensington Gardens, ending up at the Peter Pan statue. I have a soft spot in my heart for the stories about Peter Pan (especially the earliest ones. Behind the statue is a spot by some trees and shrubbery where little blue flowers were growing. It was as fresh and green as you could wish and I laid there and watched children climb on the statue. To my right two little girls in dresses were hiding behind a bush and thinking themeselves very clever for eluding their friends. The word "magic" applies here.
I could find magic in crowded places, too. In Paris one night I stood on this one manhole cover that I had discovered was directly beneath the center of Eiffel Tower, and there I stood patiently for a few minutes until ten o'clock when the light show came on. A tad silly, perhaps, but there's nothing I like more than a good dose of silliness. I was standing there looking directly up into the heart of the tower, and suddenly my vision was filled with sparkles. The word "magic" is applicable here, too.
You speak of your love for certain little out-of-the-way cafes in the places where you travel. In Paris most cafes were out of my humble student budget, but I had an interesting experience while eating at--of all places--a Subway restaurant. There I was, sitting inside eating a foot-long sub (travel makes for a healthy appetite) and looking out at the Notre Dame. The glories of an ancient cathedral, with its flying buttresses and stretching gargoyles, just outside something as ordinary and homey as a Subway restaurant.
Your article has indeed made me very happy. I'm now reflecting more deeply on experiences like these that I had while abroad and its making me smile. Thank you!
Sorry, it's not 'banger and mashed' but 'bangers and mash'. Hate to be pedantic, but I'd equally hate to have the locals roll their eyes behind your back and say 'Americans!'
It's funny really - mash is a verb and Brits are always complaining about Americans using verbs as nouns, but this is an old example showing that we Brits do it too. As for banger, I suppose it could be used in the singular, but for some reason it almost never is.
Beautiful essay. I thought it was just me that did that kind of thing. Movies, songs, people often say to us, 'Never go back'. They're wrong.
Ebert: Once knew that. Forgot. Thanks.
I am writing this before reading any of the comments, because I want to simmer in the feeling that your writing has left me in before it cools...which is a mix of nostalgia, tenderness, and reverie. I too have these little spots in places across the world. Sometimes it's a convenience store in a small town. Sometimes it's a famous landmark in a large city. More often, it's a little ordinary, regular, indistinguishable but quirky spot tucked away, with a perfect view of life passing by. These are my sanctuaries, my joys, my peace. When I somehow takes a different route or an unexpected turn and ends up at such a place, I would just know - that it's something that nobody will ever have, that moment, when I sit down at the perfect table, with the perfect view, in that perfect moment, and be perfectly at peace.
Of course, nothing is perfect, and that moment of mine probably wasn't either. The view probably could have been better if I move 5 meters to the left and away from the hum of the fridge behind me, or the espresso may be hotter somewhere else. But it doesn't matter to me, because I'm at peace, and nothing else mattered in that moment.
One difference between you and me though, Roger, is that I tend to shield these places in secret. Perhaps it's a little selfish of me, but I couldn't imagine attempting to describe the sentiment that the revisits bring me, or what the perfect moment that I once had there. A poor attempt at sharing may, I fear, ruin that familiar simmering I possess within. And I fear losing that.
Secrets are funny trinkets. They can ruin lives. Other times, they can be such tender joys.
One more thing, the most beautiful parts of a place, I always find, are those that are most damaged. Isn't that always the case? We all love to be voyeurs to our pains.
May be going to London in the near future. Will have to find that Perfect Walk book of yours. Or...would you by any chance, if you are in the city, join me for that walk? One can only ask.
This reflection reminds me of your recent blog on writing - one of my favourites. Exploring that line between stillness and cacophony (as your friend Sanjoy Ghosh notes) is wonderful. For years, I always searched for, and rarely found, quiet enclaves for writing, to which I have returned time and again. But recently I also discovered that I could sometimes write with more success by being engulfed in a sea of noise and activity. It seems easier to block out a dozen conversations than one or two people in another corner. And even when not writing, finding and sitting and enjoying that ambiance is a truly enlightening experience. When I find such places, I am reluctant to sharing them with others I know, who might show up and want to talk to me. Thank you for sharing yours.
The Fisher & Sperr book store is still on the High Street in Highgate. It is run by an older gentleman and only open a few days a week. For the first few months we lived in town my wife were not sure it was still in business. When we happen by on an occasion that it is open we always enjoy stopping in. I am not sure how much longer it will be in business or if it perhaps may change hands at some point in the future.
It is quite amazing to me that you have been to the church my wife and I used to live in. Sometimes it really does seem to be such a small world.
Ebert: That would be Mr. Sperr. He once sold me a little notebook that Edward Lear made for the young daughter of a friend. Did he show you the (usually locked) back room? Don't you love the little room upstairs, and all the old Everymans near the window?
"We visited Roger's previous visits."
I love that line. Roger, your wife sounds like a good sport and a great companion.
I recently visited a spot in California that I spent a lot of time in 25 years ago and hadn't been back since. It felt a little like chasing my own ghost, remembering things and people I hadn't thought about for so long. Very vivid memories came back that I didn't realize I had in me. Do you think memories are like a cassette tape? The first time you remember something it's like playing the tape right out of the box and it's fresh and very close to the real experience. The second time there's a little static, a little noise because you're partly remembering the remembering?
Ebert: There may be, as you suggest, the possibility of confusing the memories with the event.
I very much enjoyed this piece. I have similar rituals, though on a smaller scale. I have to say I am curious about your secret places in Edinburgh, which is the only city we have in common.
Ebert: The annual Turner exhibition, held only in January when the low sunlight levels do the least damage to watercolours. It was empty when I went at opening time one morning. The examination theater of the university medical school, where I saw a program of one-act plays by Beckett and inhaled formaldehyde fumes. Not very secret, but the memories are.
This is such a beautiful piece. You write so well..
I have traveled a bit at my young age and I remember the places, the walks, the lazing around with fondness. Pictures help too. I just got married a couple of months ago and I am looking forward to traveling with my wife and taking her to some of the places I've seen. It is such a beautiful feeling when you are a foreigner in a foreign land discovering and savoring new sights and sounds.
Dear Roger,
Thank you for this blog.
As a nineteen year old student, I will not try to rival the hundreds of incredible comments I have read. But for some reason, today and now, I feel a desire to leave a comment. Or maybe just get something out of my system.
I love going to the cinema alone. Though I adore my friends, I cannot deny that their taste in movies is complete garbage. Recently however, I have become aware of a great negative stigma against solitude. I cannot speak for older age groups, but a majority of my fellow youths frown upon one person excursions like one would mental illness.
I am glad to see the spirit of aloneness alive in this post. Though I treasure countless memories in the company of others, the most disturbing and profound moments of my life have been witnessed only by me.
Long live solitude.
Ebert: A friend once told me: "I'm not a loner. I'm a soloist."
Did you see this?
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/01/theres_a_small_cafe.html
A couple of years ago I decided it was time to travel more, and more. Once this decision is made, little signposts tend to pop up giving you hints about places you should see and things you should experience. Your blog has been one of those signposts, and so has your delightful little book "The Perfect London Walk". My library didn't have a copy, but I found a well used addition online for about $12 (4$-book,8$-shipping). And so, after a flurry of museum visits and walking tours amongst the busy downtown streets, I went on your walk for my final day in London. A perfect end. And yet a beginning, because I still have lots of places to see. Many names of which, I have taken from your writing. I'd like to thank you for that generosity.
Perhaps you'd like to take that walk again, right now?...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHM8nY5FvXM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z80-JrQDVOM
Ebert: I cannot possibly tell you how evocative those videos are, especially since, in my current physical condition, I can walk all right but will never again be fit enough to take that beloved and ritualistic walk.
A perfect summer's day. Other people strolling. The mysterious old iron fence around the tumulus, for no purpose other than to signal that someone years ago considered it worth encircling.
I first took that walk in January 1966 and at least annually from 1968 to 2005.
Send me a comment with your mailing address (which I won't post of course) and I'll send you an autographed copy of the book. This was a tangible, immediate, emotional reward from this blog.
Hi Roger,
Thank you very much. I would love to have an autographed copy of your book. My (very) used copy is ready to fall apart already. You can send it to...
[address]
I must say again that your book was a delight. It allowed for a certain amount of discovery. Even though the instructions were very clear you had to keep your eyes open to what was ahead of you and what was surrounding you. Unlike some other walking books that I had taken along, yours didn't rely on an actual map. This was an excellent choice on your part. I wasn't following a series of road signs, but moving from landmark to landmark in an explorers fashion. Well done!
The Heath was a welcome relief from busy downtown, and you were so right about there being 'characters' at the hill summit. Like the guy practicing karate with his dog (who I chose not to film). The tumulus was mysterious indeed, especially since I had wiki'd it's story before I got there. I walked it's perimeter and resisted the urge to hop over the fence, though I'll make no promises for the next time I'm there. The only thing I couldn't find was the solitary birch. Perhaps it's been removed. I looked for about 30 minutes, but hunger got the better of me and so I proceeded to the Spaniard's Inn.
And what a wonderful Inn it was. On the day I was there, they had a two Scots and a Frenchman working behind the bar. There is something about Scottish bartenders that makes me cheerful. They served an excellent lunch.
Highgate was a wonderful near-finish to the walk. It put me in a reflective mood. Our Friends of Highgate guide pointed out some wonderful little details and even allowed us to venture into the catacombs in Egyptian Avenue. Very creepy. I noticed most of the group turning back before we reached it's chilly, damp end.
Emerging afterwords into the sunlight of the neighbouring park was refreshing and peace inducing. Onward I went, and as I stood before the little stone cat I was ready to retrace my steps and do the walk again in reverse, but alas, by this time my feet would not allow it.
This was my first time in London. I know that it will not be my last. I could see myself living there for a year. I have much more to discover about the place and now I have places I want to revisit. I understand your point about 'touching bases' perfectly, and I understand the ritual of a walk.
I'm so glad you enjoyed those videos. My goal was take you along with me, so that it might bring a little smile to your face. I was certainly smiling away, under the warm sun and against the cool breeze.
Ebert: Ah, ah, yes. Did you make it past the bakery a block before Keats Grove without ordering a pastry?
Years ago the catacombs had their own lecturer, a hunchback who shuffled forward out of the gloom. The Friends of Highgate Cemeetry once went through a ferocious power struggle over the leadership.
I have re-posted both your comments here over on
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/09/the_blogs_of_my_blog.html
...which is getting most of the traffic right now.
Karl Heinz:
Of the two youtube links, that was one of the kindest things I've ever seen somebody do for somebody else.
Ebert: Karl-Heinz...I also posted your comment on thee current "Blogs of my blog"
@ Karl-Heinz,
What I would give to be there right now. Thank you for your London account and the two videos as well, which I saw this morning as I was getting ready for work. It made the drudgery of the day vanish as there is something to look forward to.