Rome Revisited / Graveyard Hamsters

Last night B and I watched Roman Holiday, the 1953 film starring Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn.

Interesting on a number of levels.

Eddie Albert, aka Oliver Wendell Douglas of Green Acres fame, appeared as a bearded hipster photographer. Weird to see him that young and that un-Mr. Douglas.

Interesting also to see how Italy is so different, 57 years later. Hitler and Mussolini managed to fuck Europe up pretty good with their little war, and it took most countries several decades to get back on their feet. An American in Europe in those days could stretch a dollar really far, and live quite well. Not that that's a fair trade-off for the suffering war brings, by any means...I just mean, it would have been very interesting to spend a year or two in Italy in the 50s, is all I'm saying.

Most interesting to me was seeing so many of the things that we'd seen just days earlier, in real life.

For instance, the address of Gregory Peck's apartment, 51 Via Margutta, is on the same street as our hotel. In the scene where Audrey Hepburn leaves Peck's apartment and walks out into the street, she walks toward our hotel and we can plainly see it in the distance----though not covered in ivy as it is now.

Also, when Peck and Hepburn are on the Spanish Steps, I wondered: was I standing in that spot, too? Same when he was at Trevi Fountain.

But, hell---lots of well-known people have walked the streets of Rome through the centuries. It's just weird to see some of them doing it on film where I did it, is all.

Several continuity errors in the film that I won't bore you with. But a note to future filmmakers: don't shoot medium-shot exteriors with a big church clock in the background and expect the audience not to notice how time keeps bopping back and forth.

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B was getting her hair done this afternoon. I wandered around during this ritual. Stumbled upon an Army surplus store I'd visited a few years ago, and thought I'd drop in and look at a backpack. (Now that my obsession with man-bags has cured itself, I'm obsessed with backpacks. Truly a sickness.)

Last time I was in the store I made the really bad mistake of asking the clerk if they had any Wehrmacht stuff. A no-no, because that's the word used for the German army during WW II. The lady must have thought I wanted Nazi memorabilia instead of ordinary modern-day surplus. Trading in any Nazi stuff is against the fucking law here----you can go to jail for it. It's like walking into a store and asking for child porn. The current, politically correct term for the army is Bundeswehr. But I don't think the clerk remembered me from last time. We had a friendly chat about the advantages of each of the backpacks she had available.

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We went to Vienna's huge Zentralfriedhof (Central Cemetery) to put some candles and flowers on the graves of B's grandparents. Walking through the place, we spotted a rodent. At first I thought it was a rat, but then I saw it was a hamster! About 50% longer and bigger than the hamsters you find at the pet store in the States. It's cheeks were full, and we saw several more of the shy creatures as we walked back to the car. They don't let you get too close. Too bad, because I really want a picture. I've never seen a wild hamster before...

The Menu Is Not The Meal

Many years ago, famous bald-headed Irish singer Sinead O'Connor tore up a photo of the Pope on TV.

The gesture seemed pointless to me, but the reaction to the gesture seemed more pointless and completely baffling, because you'd have thunk she tore the actual Pope in half, instead of just a photographic representation of him.

"But how would you feel if that was a picture of your girlfriend?" someone asked me at the time.

"There's a big difference between my girlfriend and a picture of my girlfriend. My girlfriend has nicer tits."

So now we have some shithead in Florida who's even managed to get the fucking President of the United States, who ought to be thinking about important things, to comment on his proposed burning of the Koran. And while I tend to feel a bit ookie inside when book-burning happens, I get even more ookie inside when I think about people confusing a symbol of a thing for the thing itself. The menu is not the meal, a voodoo doll is not a person, and the flag is not a country. Quit. Confusing. Them. You. Unspeakably. Stupid. Assholes!

Bill Hicks did a fantastic "joke" about the US flag once. I put joke in quotes because to me, Hicks was more of a philosopher-comedian toward the end (in the mold of George Carlin) than a mere comedian.

From billhicks.com----[underlined emphasis mine]

Did you watch the flag-burning thing? Wasn't that great? Boy, everyone showed their true colors then, didn't they? Retarded nation that we are. Scary. People just - people acted as though the Supreme Court approved of flag-burning, you know what I mean? . . . People were just: "Hey, buddy. Let me tell you something. My daddy died for that flag." Really? Wow, I bought mine. Yeah, they sell 'em, you know, at K-Mart and shit, yeah. "Yeah? He died in the Korean War for that flag!" Oh! What a coincidence. Mine was from Korea. Wow, the world is that big.

. . . I don't approve of flag-burning. I don't wanna burn a flag, but if somebody wants to burn a flag, what business is it of mine? Is it my business if somebody wants to burn a flag? Is it? No. No, it's not. Is it my business what other people read or watch on TV? NO, IT'S NOT! Thank you! You see, when you talk these things out they come a little clearer, don't they? They do. That's called logic and it'll help us all evolve and get on the fuckin' spaceships and GET OUTTA HERE! Let's go!

They say the Koran burning (which, again, remember, I said is an empty gesture) will put US troops in danger. What, as opposed to the kind of safety they'd enjoy if they were merely in Iraq and Afghanistan getting shot at and blown up without a Koran burning? If you don't want them to be in danger, don't send them to a fucking war!

See, there's plenty of stupidity to go around, folks---no need to push and shove. You can get your share.

I'm going to write my own Holy Book. Here are my Three Suggestions:

1) Be nice to each other

2) Don't be so fucking scared of everything all the time.

3) Don't be stupid.