Chapter 5: In which the channel is changed.

I feel a little as if I'm still floating, project wise. Other people are standing on their property with blueprints, and only the building left to do, and I'm still at sea. But it's a lovely view and at least I know what ocean I'm in. I'm still working in Theme Sequence with this dream world, using a TV head as symbol for my dream self, and also exploring the way that modern media influences my dreamscapes, sort of the cinematography of dreams. Last night I dreamed I was travelling to Spain again (this is the third dream about it) but most of the onscreen (on eyelid?) images were just me shaving my legs. Dreams are like that. But how does one capture that "knowing", the way that a face might look like your neighbor, but it's actually your English teacher, and you simply know? I'm mostly working with the blending, the crazy way that you're talking to your best friend and it turns out it's your mom, or perhaps becomes your mom, but you're not sure when. I'm working a bit in videography, but I think my more finished work will be in photgraphy, overlaying negatives and using multiple enlargers to make composite prints. I just have to go through all the playing of video and the action to have that motion for my images and keep them from becoming stagnant or real. I want them to retain the inclarity and morphability of dreams. I'd like to work in the same way with masterprints, but I'm also still drawn to the idea of recreating in some form an altarpiece, particularly one with St. Francis. I've been working in collage with the basic gesture of a St. Francis altarpiece by Stefano di Giovanni, known as Sassetta, recreating the silhoutte of a figure in a habit with outstretched arms, but with modern lighting. I've actually been working with images from a lighting company's catalogue. I have some images from skyscrapers that begin to look like stained glass which I like a lot. I'm going to work on some sketches of the collages and see where that takes me, but I may be doing more drawing in relation to setting up the photos as I mix them up. I'm doing the initial tast of taking the photographs now, composing them on the negative, but plan to start doing more work in the darkroom this week.

It's been interesting seeing the way people react to TV Head. A lot of people are really wild about it, they'll grin and grab their friends and point and ask me in Italian if they can change the channel. I'm going to have to develop some shtick where I do famous bits of Italian cinema then jerk my head and switch to something else as they point their invisible remotes at me, clicking furiously. (They really do this. All the time!) Right before we got on the train, we were walking through a festival in San Benedetto near a parade and I was wearing the TV and even though everyone else was costumed, I still stood out a great deal. Rather than freaking out about the monks and nuns, or the men in lace bodices and fishnets, the attention went to me.
We also went to festivals in Ascoli Piceno and Offida. Some were more family-friendly than others. (Don't believe them when they tell you Italians never get drunk.)

I really enjoyed meeting Siena's family. Tuo cugino Gionata mi ha detto che io parlo buono italiano. This was, of course, an enormous lie, but I think it was one of the most useful things anyone's said to me, because the idea of someone thinking I was good at Italian was so desirable that I have a renewed vigor for learning the language. There can be great wisdom in calling things that are not as though they are. I also found out that for me, learning is much easier in writing. Gionata's mother, Rita gave me some Italian fairytale which are currently my most highly prized possesion. They're just familiar enough to give me some context for words I don't know and keep me interested rather than bewildered. I think once I finish these (memorize these?) I'll buy another book in Italian, something more challenging. But not too challenging, Leah has Harry Potter and it seems to be in such dynamic language that it's breaking all the rules we're still struggling to learn.

On the Regionale train from Faenza to Firenze, a woman from Russia who had taken two wrong trains in an attempt to go to Rome asked us for help and we tried to sort her out, communicating with some station employees in Italian (she spoke some English but no Italian) but it didn't seem like there would be a train going to Rome that night. I hope she got where she was going, coming from Russia with only a small handbag.