same old

This always happens. I blog for a year and a half or so and then I get tired of it. I like the idea of having a blog, I just don't like actually doing anything with it. Except changing the layout every now and then. I was all right with it when I was in Rome and had something exciting and purposeful to write about but now that I'm back in the States I feel like there's really nothing much to say. So then I start to think, well, maybe I should start drawing again and post that stuff here. Or start writing again. But it's the same kind of thing -- I'll sketch or write enthusiastically for about three months and then I'll get tired of it. I don't know why I get so unmotivated. I wish I didn't. How do you get rid of unmotivation?

home for the holidays

Just a quick post to say that I'm back in the States. Adjusting hasn't been that hard except I still have the tendency to say or at least think "grazie" instead of "thank you" and it was a little odd to go to Fernbank Museum yesterday and actually be able to read all the little exhibit placards. :) I haven't been to a grocery store yet but I imagine that will seem pretty odd too. No more Mato Mato Squiz.

I start work again tomorrow, with Avatar opening. I went to see Brothers last night in Douglasville... good but intense. I have to admit that most of my interest in the movie was just because of U2's involvement with the soundtrack. But it was a good movie. Quite a departure from Spider-Man for Tobey Maguire.

there's no place like rome

The projects are done... the digital gallery is done, the portfolio is done, the culture-making project is done.

The papers are done. No more readings, no more film reviews.

The classes are done. No more humanities, no more Italian, no more group field trips to art galleries and archaeological sites.

I'll be leaving Rome in three days. I'm excited to go home and I've been excited for a while. The past couple days have been hard though, and the next couple days will be harder. I'm beginning to realize that I'll miss this place. I'll miss squishing into the packed 90 bus to get to Termini. I'll miss Piazza della Repubblica and Piazza Navona and the Via del Corso. I'll miss the Borghese gardens. I'll miss cheap Chinese food and going for gelato afterwards (and yes, I'll miss seeing my gelato man...). I'll miss the tabacchi. I'll miss taking the 60 down to Piazza Venezia. I'll miss the Pantheon.

This place grows on you. Paris was a beautiful city and I wish I had more time to spend there. But Rome still wins. Rome feels like home. It felt good to come back from Florence or Venice or Athens and know that the convent was there waiting for us.

It's finally dawning on me that I don't know if I'll ever get the chance to come to Europe again, that this could be it. For some reason it was watching Angels & Demons the other night that really made me start thinking about that. I could laugh knowingly to myself when Tom Hanks is standing outside the Pantheon with that same old gelateria in the background... I loved being able to sit there and count off all the places I had been to. It's hard to think that in three days I won't be able to just hop on a bus and go to those places anymore.

Of course I'm excited to come home in time for Christmas. And I have already pinpointed the exact location of the Starbucks inside JFK, and it will be my first stop once I'm back on US soil. But I will be missing Rome a lot.

cinema paradiso

Giuseppe Tornatore’s 1988 film Cinema Paradiso is a two-hour-long ode to cinema and film culture. The plot is fairly straightforward; much like Tornatore’s recent film Baarìa, it is a coming-of-age tale set in rural Sicily in the aftermath of World War II. Tornatore concerns himself more with character development than plot intricacy; he takes great pains to show how cinema, in particular, influences the lives of the film’s main characters.

The film was popular in both Italy and the United States upon its release, and won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film at the 1989 Academy Awards. Still, it was not without its critics. Reviewers point to length and over-sentimentality as Cinema Paradiso’s main weaknesses. “Even at its most restrained and melancholy,” writes reviewer Nathan Rabin a June 2002 article for The A. V. Club, “Paradiso still wallows in shameless sentimentality…[it] runs on a cocktail of nostalgia, sentimentality, and cinephilia.” But Rabin goes on to admit that “Tornatore’s affection for film permeates every frame.” Cinema Paradiso is undoubtedly, unabashedly, a film-lover’s film. The magic of cinema is Tornatore’s main theme, and he uses the fictional movie house (the Cinema Paradiso) as the fulcrum of his entire story. Paradiso’s two main characters, a grizzled middle-aged projectionist named Alfredo and his obsessed young apprentice Salvatore, are bonded by their love of film. To them — and to the people of the small Sicilian town where Paradiso is set — film is a way of escaping the hardship and the ugliness of real life. The film turns bittersweet when both Alfredo and Salvatore lose their faith in movie magic. Before he dies, an old and blind Alfredo insists that Salvatore must “forget nostalgia” and go make a name for himself in the real world. But in the end, when Salvatore (now middle-aged himself) has become rich and powerful, he has still not achieved the same happiness he had while working as a projectionist at the Paradiso. It seems that Alfredo was blind both literally and figuratively; he failed to see that Salvatore could have found his true calling by staying in Sicily. When the movie house is destroyed at the end of the film to make room for a parking lot, it seems like a final loss of innocence — a loss of child-like faith in something beyond the material world.

Undeniably, Tornatore’s film is manipulative. “Tornatore knows the value of cute kids and easy emotion,” admits a 1988 review by the Variety staff. But despite the schmaltz, Cinema Paradiso still resonates with film lovers. For me, as a projectionist, it was particularly meaningful. I’ve panicked when a movie doesn’t get started on time and the audience gets restless, and I’ve cringed when a film “brain wraps” and I have to rush to shut the projector down and splice away the burned and melted frames. I smiled when Alfredo talks about seeing the same film a hundred times, or about being alone in the dark of the projection booth. And I agree with him. Nothing compares to seeing a film play out crisply and perfectly on the screen, especially if it’s a film that I’ve built; nothing compares to seeing the audience react to it. There is a magic in the movies, and underneath the saccharine, sappy coating, Tornatore’s film truly captures that.

football game

Last night a group of us went to the Stadio Olimpico to see a football game, Roma vs. Basel. It was a good time. The atmosphere wasn't quite what I was expecting -- the crowd was loud and enthusiastic, but nowhere near as rowdy as I though they would be... I know nothing about football; maybe Basel isn't that big of a rival. It was about the same level of intensity as a hockey game. The one big difference is that people were setting off fireworks inside the stadium. It was an outdoor stadium but I'm pretty sure that would still be against fire safety regulations in the States. Apparently Rome has its own version of the Nasty Nest, too ... Curva Sud. Our Italian teacher warned us about it, but pretty much all that happened during the game was a bunch of cheering and flag-waving.

This is looking from our seats in Curva Nord towards Curva Sud:

thoughts on the communist manifesto

(May or may not be coherent.)

Yesterday I read the Communist Manifesto in full for the first time. I'm a little embarrassed that I haven't done that before, since the study of communism is something I'd like to specialize in as a history major (and eventually, hopefully, full-fledged historian). After reading it through, I am even more convinced that communism, as Marx and his contemporaries originally envisioned it, is fundamentally a good idea -- if there is no concept of original sin.

I'll start off by saying that the Manifesto's critiques of capitalism are right in line with some of my own critiques of capitalism. For example, the Manifesto maintains that capitalism creates a society that does not value the family or the worth of human life, a society that enslaves individuals to the State and measures personal success merely by how much cold, hard capital you have. I agree with all of that. A purely capitalistic society is ugly, and for that reason I hesitate to call myself a capitalist.

The inherent flaw of the Manifesto, of communism, is that it assumes bourgeois society is godless.

This is most apparent when the Manifesto talks of bourgeois marriage. "The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production"; "Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other's wives. Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common."

All true, if God is taken out of the equation. What the Manifesto is critiquing is a godless capitalist society. (That does not mean a society in which Christianity does not exist; but the Manifesto sees Christianity as an empty shell, a hypocritical and meaningless set of dogmas; or a corrupt political entity with ties to the aristocracy.) The Manifesto is critiquing a society in which no one, deep down in their hearts, really believes that God exists. It is a system set up precisely because God does not exist -- a system built on false assumptions.

In short, communism must assume that God does not exist, because if God did exist, communism would be irrelevant. If God did exist, communism becomes guilty of the false-dilemma fallacy. It is certainly a problem that bourgeois marriages tend to be faithless. But communism does not leave room for any other solution besides doing away with bourgeois society.

Continuing on that theme, all of the solutions to social ills that communism proposes assume that God does not exist. What communism advocates instead of faith in God is faith in humanity. It advocates faith in man's ability to live selflessly for the good of others. (In the end, that is. First, bourgeois societies must undergo brutal state despotism that does away with private property, inheritance rights, and private and home education, and institutes centralized banks, state-owned factories, heavy taxes, and "equable distribution of the population over the country." The ultimate hope of communism is that this despotism will somehow encourage personal responsibility so that eventually the State will become obsolete; "the public power will lose its political character". This has never happened in a society that claims to be communist.)

So, hand-in-hand with its disbelief in God, communism inherently, necessarily disbelieves in original sin. Communism becomes the ultimate rebellion against biblical truth. What makes it so dangerous is that many of its social critiques are legitimate, and the solutions it proposes seem logical to our human minds. Communism is proof that the most effective lies are the ones the contain a little bit of truth.

I still think that the best explanation of communism's shortcomings comes from Frank Zappa: "Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff."

letter to a historian

An interesting assignment for humanities this week... we were instructed to write some words of advice for another person in our field of study, recommending how s/he might use Machiavellian principles to "get ahead." :) Mine is in the form of a letter.

---

My esteemed colleague and fellow historian,

I am writing in response to your recent inquiry, namely how to best use your abilities as a historian in service of the State. The very first thing to remember is that those who control the past may very well control the future — a principle very ably illustrated a while ago by Ingsoc in its governance of Oceania. And a historian is most certainly in control of the past. Realizing this, you then of course realize how very necessary it is to shape and influence the “past” in the minds of the common people — to subtly influence their perceptions until everything that is undesirable or insignificant about the “past” is forgotten, and everything that is desirable and good about the “past” is brought to the fore. In doing this you are creating the very purest form of history, a “national story” if you will, that can be used to rouse the people to action, to make them take pride in who they are, and in the achievements of their country — to make patriotic pride stir in their hearts. A people with that kind of pride can be a powerful force.

Of course there are those who will say that this kind of “revisionism” is wrong, that it is a sham or propaganda, that it is not true history. (But what is “true history” really? History has always depended on who is doing the telling of it.) You must remember that “revisionism,” as they call it, is merely the means to an end. The end is a stronger State, a more unified people — a State and a people with a real sense of national identity, forged out of the shining past. If you wish to be a true historian of the State, this is the only end worth achieving. If it is wrong to rewrite the past, it is a wrong that must be committed so that we may enjoy a better future. It is, quite frankly, a necessary wrong.

I will give you a few more examples. The first that comes to my mind is from the last great world war, the Second World War. If there was anyone who truly understood just how much power can come from shaping the past, it was Stalin. You may remember hearing about Katyń, about the atrocity that happened there — twenty thousand Poles massacred by Soviet forces. What you may not have heard is that for a long while, Stalin and his successors promulgated the myth that it was Hitler’s Nazis who had committed the act. What should have incited the Polish people and indeed the Russian people to anger at Joseph Stalin instead incited them to join the Soviet forces in the fight against the German National Socialists — and in fact the Soviets did not reveal the truth of the matter until nearly fifty years later! That, my friend, is historical genius. That is how history should be used for the service of the State. (And as you can see, it is a policy well-suited for war-time.)

There is another example. If you recall Mussolini’s fascist regime in Italy, you may well remember how by pointing his people to the past he gave them a clear direction for their future. Fascist Italy looked to Imperial Rome. Mussolini gave his people a very strong sense of national identity, and he did it very thoroughly, by saturating their architecture and their literature and their films with it. The sad fact that fascism failed in Italy only proves my earlier point, that sometimes you must commit necessary wrongs. Mussolini was unwilling to do what was necessary, dissolve his Grand Council and assume sole authority — but that is a discussion for another day.

I do hope that this will help you as you seek to serve our great State. Always remember that history is a powerful tool — perhaps the most powerful tool, because it affects all humans everywhere. How it affects them, of course, is entirely up to you.