let me try to get these photos in the text. not sure how to do this and ....okay got it. more to come:
now for sperlonga photos so all of us can remember summer, just 5 days ago!

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October 14th, 2009 Rome

Wed October 14th—
Lisa B. sang for us before dinner. Her resonant soprano rang out with Monteverdi, then Purcell, then Monteverdi again —amazing. In front of a tapestry from the l6th century that covers the wall behind the grand piano---a soaring powerful diva voice.
Startling on its own and in that room with resonant sound, fabulous.
Followed by a great meal of goat cheese on toast, surrounded by radicchio and walnuts, then individual vegetable soufflés sitting on steamed leeks; followed by granita of pear and grapes —picked from behind the academy!

Its been quite a week —we have shot for two days, introducing Byron to Jane Godwin/Claire Clairmont; introducing our audience to Jane/Claire altogether; Shelley and cohorts playing chess. The weather has been splendid. From portraits by the pomegranate tree (looking like a Cranach painting) to playing badminton in the garden, to dinner at Byron’s replete with grand piano and candlelabra (room courtesy of Don Byron and candles from Mona-the chef). Okay its gothic but gorgeous!

The week began with a call from the lab that there was a color balance problem. Tuesday morning we cancelled a shoot to run over to the lab and lo and behold, the footage looked amazing. The 30 year experienced timer, Aldo, loved it and Ed—our American mediator there—kept saying, is that hand-held? Which it is. Very satisfying to know we can do this and make it look great with almost nothing: no crew, a 30 year old l6mm 100 foot load camera and two lens.
I may change my tune after seeing Campion’s Keats but for now we are very happy.

Sunday we went to Sperlonga—almost on a dare. It had rained the day before and I was afraid it would again-predicted to, but it also said the weather would be 77 and then on Monday and following days— down to 60s. I knew this was the last chance. We woke up lazily at 11am and took a taxi to Termini to take local train 12:49 to Fondi (closest train station) 70 minutes away. Got there and there was no bus to Sperlonga—usually only 10 minutes, so paid for another taxi and got delivered by 2:15pm to the Mediterranean. Water was wonderful, miraculous temp. and we swam twice and lay in the sun and went for a gelato and later wine as we climbed the city which is built into the cliff face. Amazing. The pictures are too so am trying to attach. Ooops it doesn’t work. Will try again. It being off season it was particularly quiet, two islands off the coast, a grotto with Roman statues that you can swim to. We didn’t do this being there only for the day and more interested in swimming and sunning, but it was truly romantic, a honeymoon town, particularly in off season. In the summer I could imagine it a sweet provincetown bustling with tourists---

We are off to the Palatine hill tomorrow on a guided tour and probably shooting a bit Friday morning.
Back from our tour today. IT was wonderful, beginning in the jewish ghetto and its large imposing synagogue guarded with gates and soldiers. In 2000 or bit earlier, someone opened fire on the worshippers as they left and 40 were wounded, one killed.
A summary of papal edicts closing in the Jews beginning in the middle ages, limiting their work to the rag trade—one of the churches dedicated to tailors has a fresco/painting of God fitting Adam with a fur coat! Also limiting their (the jews) lending practices but as far as I know Jews cannot charge usury (?) so perhaps Jews were lending at better rates than Christians? Anyone know for sure what led up to the edicts? An increase in population? Competition on the economic scene? Particular personalities?

Then onto the round temple di Vesta, but actually di Hercules. Beautiful Grecian marble even as repairs are ongoing. What was most amazing about this walk was the foregrounding of a synthetic layered montage that is Rome. It’s not just that history is layered, buildings on top of buildings that are buried 27 feet or less or more underneath, but that there is this mishmash of materials, spoilae=meaning materials stolen from one building and used in another (from spoils of war). Up in the air on a cross arch among the tufa and brick are two two-feet marble columns laid sideways—perhaps medieval repairs? Or rebuilding from fallen/broken materials? A church in which there is an 8’x8’ cut out for another roman temple 1000 years older on the portico. A wall of the church of Nicolas Encarcere (or is it Giorgio Encarcere? =bound) with Roman columns filled in to form the church wall.

Rome is a pastiche. Indeed what we think of as classical is a layered dense historical semiotic mass. No wonder it is an architect (Robert Venturi) who coins the term “post-modern’. Indeed the classical is post modern in spirit and structure, and not that sere white quiet. More is more.

Thursday October 8th—Rome

Thursday October 8th—
Shot this week, two days in one of the composer/administrator’s house from the 1600s: beautiful windows that open with wood shutters looking out to palm trees and lemon/orange/grapefruit groves. All the fruit currently green…it will ripen in the winter. We have covered three scenes so far (out of currently 105!) Thus, we have begun the film. Ran through or stumbled really into many technical difficulties and survived surpassed—well we have not seen the rushes on l6mm yet in truth—but moving forward. So many lovely concatenations. We are double shooting in video and l6mm film—that has given us both backups and confirmed hope. Our Percy and Mary are splendid, and the ‘home movie’ or realism of the so-called un-acting, being actually, is staging undercurrents that should enrich the characters as they develop. That is my hope. We find an old iron lamp in one of the rooms, originally candles with hanging tools to cut the wick---in the hot sun the shadows move and marry wondrously silhouetted in camera.
Mary has been studying and writing, she just gave birth to her first child and is finding happiness with Shelley for the moment (!).

Meanwhile in the back garden of the Academy the persimmons are ripening. Ready for some single-frame magic—large orange globular—. Our Rome lab is in an old monastery nearby the Coliseum plus I have 5 willing interns with difficult schedules.

I find my self drawing closer and closer to Mary Shelley, she of the ambiguous Heroine—no wonder woman here—but a complex unmothered soul caught in web of her time whom even her sister, however jealous of Shelley’s love, describes as having a ‘noble intellect.’ Problematic and strange and of course Frankenstein’s’ creation will be added to the mix. Many ideas proliferating in this high ceiling spectacular studio. (I will learn how to add pictures so you can see)

Early in the week we heard a lecture from a Harvard prof about a lost Shakespeare play. Most interesting to me was when he commissioned a bunch of international theatre groups to perform it and they each took it into cultural particulars: the Japanese setting it as a bike boy play ala early Wooster group, motoring out a rear garage door; the Spanish version a confrontational attack on the ‘genre’ romantic comedic convention altogether —going to the heart of its inherently sexist center; the Zagreb group sticking with an eastern Europe wannabe capitalist west wish (did I hear death wish?).

Reading Henry James on Rome and the coast, Spezia specifically where Shelley died—he talks of the Italians as enjoying life of beauty without guilt. This wondrous luxury of sun and sweet smells, little blue flowers clambering over everything with startling flat-topped Mediterranean pines in the scenic distance combined with fat palm trees and a sparkle surprise flowering yucca behind a wall. The iron swallows that decorate and hold up rain gutters, the ancient knockers on the studded door to the house we filmed in today, the patterned black and white and grey floor. Yes the catholic church is corrupt but the detail craftsmanship, attention to beauty— the sense of salvaging and valuing the past because it has density history is soothing somehow. Even the dirty Tiber has a silver sheen at twilight crossing back on Ponte Sisto with its graffito of she wolves and mototrinos speeding by, a colored flash in our digital records.
Memorable spicy pasta, overpriced used clothing stores (where we searched for costumes and failing that helped ourselves to gelato), great shafts of light and air coming in our window in the mornings after the light has climbed the wall —a lazy inexorable lizard. Up against the parking garage the walls are covered with vines vertical green shaky and reminding me of Chinese letters in their linear insistence—so glossy with in themselves they nearly defeat the polluting motors.
We are flooded with sun and great weather.

This weekend we need some events—out of the city we hope—as we have worked so hard to get this far. Will keep you posted.
Baci a mis amici
Abby

Friday October 2, 2009 Rome

This week we finished our three weeks of Italian lessons, so now…— we get our mornings back (!) but miss Valeria, our teacher, and must try to consolidate what we have learned on our own. Moreover, the more we learned it seemed the less we knew; I realized I learn language from writing and reading. Then again, the Italians speak faster than I read: total run-on and hearing the words even when I was reading the text was difficult. For our final effort we sang pop songs ‘”tutta mia la citta” where the guy is crying for his love who is with “lui” –the other man. Now-to see if studying on my own will help abbastanza (enough).
For complex shopping I admit I am still using Babel fish—quite handy.

One of the painters bought 2500E (that’s $3500 US!) worth of linen canvases and when all were delivered, another fellow asked if he had performance anxiety. His answer:
“My life is performance anxiety.” And then…that he felt “a genius growing, the hubris of ambition.” I think here we are all in that state.

Two nights ago, Adele gave a lecture about the place and though perhaps we originally brought a skepticism, by the end we were amazed—how to follow in the steps of Cy Twombly, Frank Stella, Aaron Copeland, Ralph Ellison et al? Of course I notice there is not a single famous woman from the past. I am ready for a different future…

This week I finished casting—a not so difficult segue. A tremendous set of faces. I think there will be good resonances between the cast, even as the more I read about Shelley’s radical community the more I come to think of him as a cad, not even the “ineffectual angel” in Matthew Arnold’s judgment (then again I never read Matthew Arnold). Although to s’s defense, he is thrown out of college for writing a text on Atheism and in Queen Mab (his long poem) sided with the working class. I would like to emphasize that end of his radicalism, though the melodrama and romance of his love affairs and Mary’s strange tolerance of it all—a homage to her mother perhaps?—complicates making of her the feminist heroine. I will have to go back to 80 AD and Queen Boudicca, an English queen who waged guerilla warfare against the Roman invasion under Claudius. That will be my next feature, with historical costumes out of Xenia, Warrior Queen! Always wanted a bit of the kitsch of Wonder Woman in my films!

We walked last Sunday across the entire town, encountering walls popping out of houses (or rather houses popping out of walls), all the way to the Villa Borghese Gardens where we stopped for iced tea and a rest, and found the edges littered with condoms---clearly a gay meeting place in the eternal city. We walked back as the light sank in the sky. We had stopped along the way at the Church of Minerva, with an incredible Fra Lippi set of frescos---very magnificent late 1400 painting with softness and sweetness of its era. A full figure Michelangelo that is not so exceptional and has a weird almost iron looking cloth round his loins. Turns out my eyes were accurate and this bronze drapery was added at a later date. The photos show how odd it is. Then a magnificent secular bust by Bernini which is sharp and alive.

Later in the week in between casting we went to the pantheon—amazing space. I have to go when it rains — the rain falls direct into its marble interior. Built in 25BC burned and rebuilt in 75 AD, it remained until recently the largest dome shaped building expanse. Once covered in bronze (I think) plates that have been removed. We got permission to go inside the back and see a beautiful rough Madonna and child on wood from Constantinople and see the back buildings which were originally baths. The interior seems so baroque to me and indeed it has been a church for hundreds of years but one realized that the so-called classic buildings were covered with polychrome— either marble or frescos and perhaps not the sere classical buildings we think of. We also went below the plaza navona—I talked about this place earlier: the stadium---here we were among the bleachers so to speak---a magnificent setting for a play I thought since everywhere you looked were half walls that people could come in and out of appearing and disappearing. Playwrights this is for you! We also climbed the Marcus Aurelius Tower (similar to hadrian) with a great view --not particularly claustrophobic to climb but dizzying as it circled up 80 feet. At the top we were told not to take pictures to the east which was Berlasconi's palace! funny to think he told the tourists not to peek! We have an 87 year old visiting scholar who made it up to the top and followed all of us for the afternoon. She is amazing--truly an inspiration. She is a costume designer and work a place mat on her head but it was cool; later she bought a table runner from the old jewish quarter and sewed it together to be a blouse. playful and energized!

Weve been up to the roof single-framing skies and moons and clouds, including one day this weekend when there was a protest so the helicopters kept circling---annoying. usually we just see the green parrots that have escaped and made home in the park pamphilli next to us.

We’ve been doing yoga regularly and tasting gelato and eating well and cooking communally Sunday. Just to give you a taste or rather a sense of mouth-watering amazement; I cooked stuffed squash blossoms zucco di flori or maybe flori di zucco?; someone else did veal chops rare, another a piquant chicken; another a pasta with basil and fresh parmigiano reggiano. Someone else made half tomatoes with blue cheese on them and sauted sage leaves on top of that. Yummy. You should all try it!

For now—the dinner bell calls!
Ciao!

sept 25th--the roman shade to caravaggio

Friday September 2009 25th,

The Roman shade is nothing like what we know in America. It is a solidly built enormous sheet of metal slats that one pulls up and down from inside the room, 6-10 inches inside the window depending on the thickness of the building. Here in the mckim white edificio, the windows are 8 feet high (our room 12-13 feet high?). the slats connected across the width with little bolts so that even closed a staccato tattoo of light marches across the wall with the sunrise. Exquisite tapestry of light that spreads slowly from 7 am to 7:30 am. Then you return to sleep if you don’t have your Italian lessons Mondays through Thursdays mornings! We love our class but will be glad to have our mornings back
You can pull up the shade all the way to reveal the mediterranean pine, animated trunks with flat tops, looking almost trimmed 40-50 feet above ground. In the doria pamphili park, the trees seem as if they are going to walk and follow you as in some children’s fantasy film by Peter Jackson.
Yesterday—was it yesterday? Perhaps wed we took a walk down to the farnese palace via the via giula, a lovely renaissance street with arch and rough fountain [I should find a way to accompany these blogs with fotos, eh?] and then on to campo d’fiore where people were selling flowers—not the usual food and meats by the time we got there…maybe after 3pm. Looked like a fantastic restaurant on the north east side of the square where ‘real’ Italians, not us tourists, expats, et al would go; failed to find the forno, an acclaimed bakery. We weren’t hungry —we are fed too much, two large meals a day, ala California nouvelle cuisine since the chef studied with alice waters of chez panisse (lala); Mona is terrific. But my stomach can’t quite take it day in and day out. Luckily they don’t feed us sat night nor all day Sunday. And I’ve taken to ordering the picnic lunch so I can be free to eat when I will ---but all is delicious. Never seen so many ways to cut up and marinate fennel.
I could go on about the food for sure: gelato- frutta de bosco, my favorite as it is raspberries blues and blackberries in a delicious sherberty mix. And definitely some places are better than others. I’ve had so so gelato and a magnificent one.
But enough of the edible.

Back to our walk — we went on to the piazza navona, which is a corruption of the word for piazza of struggle since it was initially a stadium. Something like 14 feet below is the original structure from the 2nd century where the gladiators fought and the chariots ran. We saw some clips from ben hur but the best were clips from a black and white version 1929 or 27 out of Hollywood, at a Fellow’s talk. The black and white was very beautiful and presumably the chariots were more authentic as well as more dangereous stunts!
From there we wandered wondered got lost and then found the santa francisca, in renovation on its façade with the three caravaggio of st. matthew’s martyrdom interior. I am learning more about Catholicism than I ever imagined— Magnificent paintings. the angel coming down on an elder st matthews is so suggestive, sensual, his curls almost covering his eyes and the s curve of the painting's structure energetic and clear. The work is modern in its power. Another painting has jesus and st peter on the right in clothes of their time pointing a finger (in the exact same image as michaelangelo’s hand of god at the Sistine chapel) at matthew who is a tax collector (!) and whose original name is Levi, his head down among 5 other characters at the left of the painting all in renaissance clothes. There is a sharp line of light coming in from right to left and the hand is in a shadow area, signifiying the separation of the secular and sacred. Very powerful particularly the detail of the young boy who is watching, perhaps 12. Caravaggio’s young boys are compelling to me so sensuous, their skin a realist marvel.
I bought a book at the church which spoke of c’s love of a woman but it seems to me though possible unlikely, or perhaps like Cellini, he is bisexual. Ah those greeks and romans! They had it all. C’s end was quite desperate however running from a third degree murder rap and dying of malaria on the coast just as the pope gave him dispensation to enter rome!
The melodrama of the past----I am finding it not unexpectedly in my script for shelley and his circle. I may need to revisit my ideas of melodrama and modernity, along with future studies of image and text. So much to do, perhaps enough time?

roma 9-22

9-22.09

The city on the hill with the clouds covering it grey and grey again and up top clouds
there is not a skyscraper in this city it is amazing a horizon of villas of pink and orange and tangerine and yellow and clay and ochre. And above the clouds are ripe breaking, a promise of a future sun.

my Italian is steadily improving. I make sentences and mix the feminine and masculine.
Did you know the words that represent feminine things are masculine and vice versa.
So really with an accent at end: como café, look masculine and are feminine. And various other plurals. Confuso but its fun too since we are building a vocabulary and structure. Doppo como despues…molto interssante

The characters of the folks are coming out—some annoying and others more and more endearing.
We cooked Sunday and indeed there are some great cooks here.
Stephen’s fantastic Italian cauliflower with onions garlic pignoli nuts and raisons.
Lauren’s lentils with parsley and shallots uncooked and red wine vinegar.
Uyum….am I eating too much? for sure. But trying to keep it all under control.
A bit difficil

Practiced yoga twice already in my heroic studio. Fun especially with another

John Guare arrived tonight and fun to see him and Adelaide kiss and snuggle. Why am I so touched by affection that is long built?
Like the quote from Willa Cather….a promise of kindness..

On the film front got out letters first emails, contacted Kodak and Matt made good connect with laboratorio. So cross fingers etc. Now more research, screen tests and buying of film. Will need to take out money domani.