A Past That Watches The Future

A thousand rainy days and I spoke
on tongues that talk of saints, burned down days like cigarettes for your hollow praise. Down the days that you forget, count the pictures that you keep. Keep it, hide it all away, let it never show... "Torch" - Pyschedelic Furs


So I have been back in New York City for about a week, and ironically...it is here in this First World country that I have been without electricity and hot water for the entire time. I'm stuck in a large, seemingly endless blackout which struck Queens (aka the Forgotten Borough) on last Monday. Power is returning to people slowly, but as of last night I only had one random light bulb working...which it strikes me may be how a cruel critic might describe my artistic temperment. Alas, my trip to Sicilia was pretty great, and what follows is a rough sketch of what I saw and a lot of photos. I would really like to write something substantial, like a novel, about what I felt when in Sicilia, but that would take some time that I don't have, and a few more trips to Italy which I can't afford. This was a trip I took with my parents, mostly about being with them, and rest assured we had a lovely time together but what follows are mostly my private observations and thoughts during the days here and there which I managed to steal away from the tour group (which was an experience in itself.) I hope you enjoy it.

Portrait of Sicily As A Broken Heart

I knew very little about Sicilia before spending a few evenings prior to my trip reading up on it. I knew all my ancestors (including my enigmatic, never seen French great grandfather) resided there, in a land usually talked about by non-Sicilians (including other Italians) in disparaging whispers concerning the Mafia, or the people's brown skin, or their emotions which always seem on the verge of coming undone.

I remember my two great grandmothers who passed when I was younger. Both had came over from Sicilia. My great grandmother Mary, spoke almost no English, and wore the weariness of her home land upon her brow, within her knees. Even her hair looked tired. She walked with a single crutch, and cooked all she would eat in a single pan. While she was alive, she was merely an antiquated mystery to a teenage punk with his mind on the future. Now, I finally have some clues...and a desire to understand them...but the mystery, as known to her, is long buried beside her.

So I learned what I could in 9 days.

Upon returning from Sicily, I now recognize certain kinds (or colors) of angst, anxiety, and desire...as essentially Sicilian. I also recognized a certain haunted quality in the eyes and words of our female tour guide Roberta...that I had always recognized in myself. All Sicilian's are mope rockers. It's just that the 'rock' is literal. She pulled me aside on the bus to explain how Sicilians lived mostly in "shadows, waiting for the light." And of how "one day brings happiness, and the next maybe death." Traveling around Sicilia, you don't see death lurking down every alley the way you might in Basra or Somalia. But I completly understood why she saw its form in an arrangement of clouds, heard its footsteps in the rattle of her vespa. I couldn''t explain it either, but I could understand. She taught me an amazing Sicilian expression which translates as "You cry with one eye." Which she explained meant that there was always sadness, and loneliness in life in Sicilia, but also always beauty and wonder...so you cry with one eye, and keep the other open to take in whatever magic may emerge. It struck me when she told me that, that I too, like my countrymen, have been "crying with one eye" all my life, and so have my songs. The expression reminded me of the Oscar Wilde quote which I have always so adored, "We are lying in the gutter but looking at the stars." Perhaps this is the natural human condition. In the gutters of London or Palermo or Bedford Stuyvesant. I've often felt ashamed of my watery left eye. Maybe it is nothing to be proud of, but maybe its nothing to be ashamed of either...I dunno. Perhaps we should just be grateful that we still have one eye that sparkles...and sees wonder.

A few things about Sicilia...

It is an Island, as all melancholy things are.

It is a broken place. Or perhaps better to describe it as a cracked place, a damaged place. Not broken. Never broken. But there was no renaissance there.

There are no Sicilians. They were just survivors, prisoners, resisters, immigrants. The first Sicilians, whoever they were...wherever they came from... were erased by 3000 years of occupation and empire by The Greeks, The Byzantines, The Vandals, The Arab Muslims, The Normans, The Spanish, ad infinitum. To be Sicilian was to be adaptible, resilient & woeful. Only once did they overcome their occupiers, when the lads at the Sicilian Vespers tore out each Frenchmen's tongue in 1282, drove them from the land. But then it was soon a return to being sold or given as a wedding gift amongst kings and tyrants.

Sicilia's land itself speaks of a broken heart in topographic metaphor. It is covered by fierce, forboding but beautiful mountains. To live in Sicilia often means finding a space, a pocket between or upon these craggily spires on which to rest. Sicilia is branded by the shadow of The Volcano Etna, which never rest. It smokes, it broods, it's onyx sands and frigid fog appearing like an inverted oasis. There is depth and awe in it. When it's errupts, the people pray for their lives to pagan spirits inside it. Go(o)d is forgotten when earth turns into fire. Sicilia is a mystical place, but it is as full of myths and monsters as it is angels.

What isn't mountain or ash is often arid plain. The Roman's turned the lush Sicilian wilderness into a factory farm during their reign to supply grain for soldiers. Much of what was green and tall was consumed for the glory of others. Those plains remain a weary breadbasket, scorched by the mediterean sun, scalded by the North African winds.

The cities are amazing, conflicted mysteries of poverty and antiquity. Greek, Roman, Arab, Norman structures mixed together...like a sleeve of architectural tattoos. It is marked, not designed. Everything is coated in the thick soot of cars and motorinos...even the Baroque intersection which is Palermo's most famous. The picturesque is a luxury in Sicily.

And along the coasts, people fish...sunbathe...stare out at the water...think about leaving...imagine what's across those oceans...

They fantasize about places that are flat and stay the same. In other words...the opposite of what we fantasize about.

Chapter 1) Taormina: It may have been better to have visited Taormina last instead of first. For of all the places I would see in Sicilia, it was the only one where pleasure and peace and a kind of old-school hipster luxury had prevaled over the chaos and corruption and decay which equally defines Sicilia. It was Abel without Cain. Taormina is a resort town which spirals up a seaside mountain. It is remarkably beautiful and isolated/insulated from the usual chaotic energy of Sicilia. It's transformation from impoverished 18th century town (itself a transformation from its ancient Greek splendour as a grand satellite of the great Syracuse) to what it has been now for about120 years... a panoramic, bohemian and slightely decadent tourist resort.. really began with the notoriety brought to it by a remarkable aristocratic gay photographer named Wilhelm von Gloeden.

At the end of the Victorian era, his provocatively "neoclassical" photos of young sicilian fisherman and shepards, recast as nude greek ideals...brought fame and intrigue (and later under Mussolini, imprisoment to his assistants) to both von Gloeden and Taormina. Soon Wilde, Mann and Klimt, and later Dietrich, Tennesse Williams, Capote, Faulkner and many others would seek inspiration (and perhaps obscurity) there, and many many more tourist followed.

In Taormina, the old hotels and bustling bistros that line the Corso Umberto, share space with Benneton and Diesel shops. They all share space with medievel churches and squares, a beautiful english garden, and the ancient greco-roman theatre, which is still used for concerts. It's a strange amalgamation of desires that somehow works. We were staying in the poshest hotel I'd ever been in, a new joint called The Grande San Pietro, which overlooked the sea. From the twinkling piano in the bar, to the pool set upon a rocky overhang, this was as close to Fellini-esque glamor as I was likely to see anytime soon. I read British Vogue poolside while British girls sun bathed topless. I swam some horrific looking laps, before returning to my Dewars & Coke. It was glorious.

After a day or so of gelato, birdwatching, and aimless strolling, I started to feel a bit guilty and decided to make a pilgramage to "Madonna of The Rocks," a small church/sanctuary located high upon the mountain, that would require many kcalories to reach...whatever they were. From all around Taormina, you could see a tiny cross on top of a crumbling castle looming high

above you. From the central square, it appeared to the left of the cross atop the main church in the picture to the left. That was where I was going. My brother took one route, a series of steps which led straight up the rocks to the sanctuary. I decided to wind my way up the streets, past the homes and pensiones and meet him there. Both were hot, steep journeys...and a really good opportunity to mediate, and do a bit of healthy suffering. For no matter how heavy a body feels walking diagonally up a rock in the Sicilian summer...it is nothing compared to weight others beared.

It was a long, dusty walk up the twisting one lane road, and I had to press up againgst a few walls to avoid being crushed by citroen vans. When I finally got to the sanctuary, I was rewarded with some absolutely stunning views of Taormina below, the sea, and off in the distance...the volcano Etna.
Inside the sanctuary was a simple little church carved out of the stone. It was empty but for one man keeping guard with a basket for donations. I put in a 5 Euro note and enjoyed a few moments of absolute silence and reflection. It was lovely.

Outside the church, I found that the main gate to the castle (upon which the cross rested) was chained up. I had followed that cross from faint apparition on the mountain, till now...and I could only look upon it from behind bars. I felt the heaviness of my flesh & bones...and thought it perhaps better that I should be reminded of the limitations of my elevation.

A moment later I heard my brother call my name and joined him on his walk back down the steps. Each section of steps was marked with an expressionist-ish sculpture of one of the stations of the cross.

Finally back in town we sat at the legenday Wunderbar cafe and drank Pellegrinos and ate sandwhiches in the same piazza that Capote and Fellini and others had. It had that same impeccably preserved, yet distinctly faded glamour that Le Duex Magot in Paris has. You can feel the history and ideas of the past, but it seems more likely that new one's will come from the cafe down the road. In New York, at the height of My Favorite, I used to go to the Le Gamin Cafe off Avenue B, to try to enchant my life with the Paris of Camus and De Bouvier. One day I ran into Stephen Merritt and his puppy, and we had a little chat...and I thought perhaps I had made it a salon through force of will. Now that I'm back in New York I think I'll try to find a new Wunderbar somewhere out near the dunes of Amagansett.
Sitting at that cafe table, I smiled sheepishly at how relatively quickly (if not effortlessly) we had gone from the silent and spirtual, to the very human and sensual. If anything had come to represent the paradox of Taormina...it was that feeling.

Coming soon (within a week or so)...Chapter 2...The brothers climb a volcano...see many ruins...rule the World.