I had a feeling that I would need an ancillary agenda item on this trip. Ukulele. I brought one with me and wrote an albums worth of material, kinda as theme songs to the time I did here. There was some down time. Alright. Last night, I went to one of the little bridges in Venice, and I played all the songs. As a soundtrack to drunk people wandering back to their hotels at 2 in the morning. People stopped and hung out. Danced. I got 3 kisses. OK, 2 of ‘em was from the same girl but I swear she changed clothes somehow.
So no matter what happens or how my time here is perceived or how cranky I am that the art world is a myopic shithole or how great ice cream is all that’s left of the Roman empire… always and forever I’ll be able to pick up my uke and play these songs and remember the night that I sat on the Rialto bridge with the moon so full it looked like it was going to explode and I played the songs I wrote on the Spring Break Parking Lot Tour 2009 and humanity got softer around the edges with 4 poorly tuned strings and a head full of Fernet. The album I wrote, ya know… that summer I spent in Italy…
“myopic shithole”. Thank you for that, I’d been searching for a concise descriptor for that phenomenon. And last night, cruising up the Bosphorus with global financial advisors and marketing professors, I would have given something to crawl back into that shithole. I would have given something to hear you play the ukelele on the Galata Bridge. And would have laughted when you got kissed by moustachioed Turkish fishermen. Kolay Gelsin