[j|f]unction following form in fURNishing: INT & EXT [s|p|l]aces to the MAXXI

it's been a month now since we've been in our new Roman digs | & 2 weeks since my last confession | & 1 week since we've been furnished & our inanimate possessions in their rightful places & our built-in shelves stocked with books like a river with fish | i often feel conflicted [here] about how & what to write about | to me this site is my sensory observations & musings on language & art [& as such must be written in the voice of the part i'm researching] | but also as such [this] is also inextricably & inHEREntly twined with our living SITUation—the [s|p|l]aces we occupy on a day-to-day level | & personS we know personALLY that may or may not care about language or art [at least in the way i do] might come [here] to get an update on how we are doing [in the more typical ¢ense of a JOURnaling bLog] | so for those here are images of our new situation on via Titta Scarpetta:

where i am writing from

Malian mask & Indonesian temple dog [Singha]

Fancy Avian Platter & spiral stairs leading further up ...

i guess i should take a step back & give the tour in order starting at ground level | this video shows our place starting on the street & going to the top [to the tune of «At Home He's A Tourist» by Gang of Four:

j's den [& the Ikea fold-out couch you'll sleep on when you visit]

1st floor bathroom [with tank perfect for taping gun behind]

back up on the 2nd floor living room [a.k.a. the Swedish vampire ark cabin]

painting of j over heartH [note stone-carved panel in back of fireplace]

& the slotted built-in wood fixtures ...

hanging lamp is something we picked up in Morocco that i wired up myself
as well as the Mexican star lamp that i had to rewire after frying it [& half our appliances] on 220 V

emBEDding DNA ladder

porthole window looking into heirLoom grapeVine

upstairs bathroom [complete with bidet]

upstairs bedroom looking out onto patio [& displaced Malawian chief's chair]

reflection of patio in bedroom door [bedroom also has coconut frond matted carpet like the living room]

looking SE off patio [w/ L-to-R: { basil | thai peppers | spicy greens | arugula}—all grown from seed]

patio looking NE [w/: { cilantro | tomatoes | beans | lemon tree | grape vine | jalapeños }

what i like about it most is it's like living on a ship—a good [s|p|l]ace to continue writing the \∀/RK Côd∃X though lately i've been deRailed by not only reSITUating ourselves & adapting to this new CULTure but by learning Italian [& OK the buzz of vuvuzelas has been rather distracting too] | learning another language makes you rethink your own mother tongue | knowing Spanish the words of Italian come easy to me—it's just the synTax & splicing sentences together that is foreign & awkward | in that respect Italian is more like French [of which i only have 2-3 months of real world experience with]  | when you learn language as a child you don't stop to think about it [the language itself] much—or at least i didn't & i somehow got away with never taking an English grammar class | you take language for granted or become desensitized to it like you do traffic noise | even Spanish is something i learned on the streets & only after the fact when i returned to fINish my last few years of high school in the states did i take «a class» to fulfill some sort of requirement & only then was i told what it was i was actually learning [in technical terms] & what the rules were | the way i'm learning Italian [Rosetta Stone] is cool in that it's all by example like how a child learns or how you'd learn it on the streets | you are given a situation & you have to figure out what to say rather that just answer useless questions like «what is that past-pluperfect subjunctive participle of the conditional tense of the verb to be» which only piles on another layer of b.s. terminology to memorize & shield you from actual meaning | maybe it's the physicist in me that makes me think of language as simply action [verbs or ACT-ions] & objects being acted on [nouns] or reducing things further into the smallest discrete components—LETTERS [as you can see in the above video tour written on the slot on our front door] | letters [atoms] forming words [molecules] & words forming sentences [chemical reactions] & all of this encoded into language & strung together into books written [decoded or transcribed] from your ribosomal RNA | OK i said i wasn't going to get distracted by digressions on language but i did so back to our living situation [which has everything to do with language & language really is not that different than architecture or interior design or home furnishing... ] | who was it that said the top 5 criteria for finding an apartment are 1. location 2. location 3. location 4. location & 5. location? or maybe it was the top 10 | & who was it that was telling us about how certain people are hard-wired genetically to be predisposed to living near water? or in particular rivers? j & i definitely have that gene [though we both lack the asparagus gene] | we can't see the river from our window [unlike our last place in Brooklyn] but the Tiber is a stone's throw away as is what's left of this bridge built in 100-200 B.C.:

Ponte Rotto—the first stone bridge built across the Tiber

...still standing after 2000+ years | there's a bridge just upstream from it [Ponte Cestio] that was also built in B.C. times & is still intact & being used [for pedestrians anyway] | every time i cross it it blows my mind—talk about a lot of water under the bridge | i can't think of a better city & a better spot within this city to live in | even the building we live in is as old as the U.S. | & every time i leave the house in a different direction i discover something new | my latest favorite place that i've been running every day & that we went to on a picnic yesterday is Villa Doria Pamphili | beyond just the villa & secret gardens & grottos there are expansive tracts of open space with a network of dirt trails which—in typical Roman fashion—has no order to it so you can explore or run around randomly & haphazardly rather than [like in American parks] feel like a rat running in circles or on some sort of prescribed circuit with the hordes of other rats ||

Gianicolo fountain [on the road leading up to Doria Pamphili]

Ossario's Mausoleum [also on the way up to Pamphili]

beheaded statues in front of the villa

sunday afternoon under an almond tree—only a few km from downtown Rome

j's take on it [via her ipod mini]

not everything is ancient in Rome though | a few weeks ago a new contemporary art museum opened [Maxxi] architected by the Iraqi deconstructionist architect Zaha Hadid:

Maxxi at sunset

approaching Maxxi

Anish Kapoor piece in lobby

inside Maxxi looking out

DeDominicis skeleton outside

the main attraction [or distraction?] at Maxxi though seems to be the building itself which for an art museum seems self-defeating | i wasn't crazy about much of the art inside anyway | there was a lot of space devoted [wasted?] to Gino DeDominicis | & another wing filled with junk by the Turkish artist Kutluğ Ataman—except OK maybe this piece was mildly interesting:

& ok this one by Anselm Keifer was texturally interesting [& smelled oddly nostalgic]

Tiber debris as seen from bridge leading to Maxxi [the Tiber also smells sweetly nostalgic & primordial]

comprehensive  exhibit of Luigi Moretti's architectural works which ok was pretty incredible
& gives a lot of insight into why a lot of public spaces look the way they do in Italy

Zaha Hadid designs for Maxxi

the realization

EXT. Maxxi

fragile glass domes within domes within Maxxi [i forgot the name of the artist]

INT. Maxxi

there was a concert after in the courtyard around Maxxi featuring some DJs & this Koudlam guy who was entertaining in that pretentious French way | & there was quite the scene of Roman hipsters drinking mojitos still living like they were all wonderfully stuck in a Fellini film | fuck Ricky Martin we're living La Dolce Vita ||

(copyright is a dinosaur) 2010 Derek White