Savvy Women

Last month I spent three glorious days touring Rome, Italy’s capital and a locale that can arguably be called the largest open-air museum in the world. Before my arrival there, I reserved a room in a four-star establishment called the Donna Laura Palace Hotel, which is located in the lovely and quiet Prati district, on the western bank of the Tiber River. Unfortunately, I don’t have many photos of the hotel, but I do have this one. It shows the lobby and was taken the morning I was leaving Italy and while I was waiting for the driver to take me to the Fiumicino Airport for my return flight to Cairo.

On my first evening in the city, as I was sitting and having a drink up at the hotel’s rooftop bar and restaurant, I met Chris, an American graduate student in his late twenties who was, like me, doing the tourist thing in this beautiful part of the Italian Peninsula. We hit it off right away and ended up spending the following day seeing a good chunk of the city together. Chris can be seen in the following picture. In it, he is photographing some watercolor paintings being sold by one of the many talented artists who call Rome home. (I ended up buying one of the fellow’s pieces and now have it framed and hanging on my wall.) By the way, this photo was taken not more than a stone’s throw away from the Colosseum and the Arco di Constantino.

Knowing that I would be traveling to the Eternal City, a friend, someone who’d been to Rome himself, gave me some advice before my trip. He said, “Don’t worry about buying a guidebook. All you need to do is take off, in any direction, and wander. It won’t take you more than five minutes to stumble upon some beautiful spot, often the sort of place overlooked by the travel experts.” I took his advice and discovered that he was right. As a matter of fact, the following picture, of the Piazza del Popolo, was taken as Chris and I were vagabonding about. When we discovered this lovely square, neither one of us had a guidebook in hand nor were we carrying a city map.

On my second day in the city, I set my sights on the Vatican. I had a vague idea about the direction I needed to go in, but that was it. I wanted to wander until I found it and expected to see many interesting places along the way. In fact, I found a lovely sidewalk café after walking twenty or so minutes in a generally westerly direction from the Donna Laura. Because it was such a warm morning and the place seemed so inviting, I decided to stop there and have a cool drink. The picture I’ve included was taken while I was sitting at one of its tables.

I eventually did find the Piazza San Pietro and was blown away by it. I probably spent more than an hour just taking pictures of the place, including the one immediately following this paragraph. The size and grandeur of the square and basilica were overwhelming and certainly did give a sense of the power of the Roman Catholic Church.

So far, I can see that I’ve provided no definitive photographic evidence to prove that I was even truly in Rome, so I’ve decided to throw this one in, of me standing in front of some statuary at the Monumento Nazionale a Vittorio Emanuele II.

OK, so what can I say in conclusion that will provide you with a sense of what Rome is like? After carefully thinking about this question, I realize that no words can do the city justice. It has to be seen to be believed, and even then, you might doubt the veracity of what your eyes have beheld.

I’ve long been a fan of Barbara Ehrenreich, author, progressive political activist, and contrarian extraordinaire. In this clip—excerpted from a much longer Fora.TV video–Ehrenreich discusses her views on the American tendency to always see the glass half full. Such “bright-sided” thinking, a kind of delusion that requires those who employ it to walk around with a smile plastered on their faces all the time, is a theme she fully explores in her 2010 book, Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America.

Actually, now that I think about it, this argument—that overly optimistic thinking is causing us to misdiagnose the causes of many of our most pressing problems and is then misdirecting us when we attempt to solve them—is one she makes time and again in an earlier bestseller, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, a work that looks at the results of “welfare reform” during the Clinton presidency. To understand how these reforms have impacted low-income Americans, Ehrenreich conducted an experiment and went undercover to live and work with those on the lower end of the socioeconomic scale. (She accomplished this by spending a period of time employed as a minimum-wage waitress in a diner in small-town Florida.)

What she learned during this experience is that welfare reform was enacted by those who were under the influence of bright-sided thinking. Those legislators reasoned (completely incorrectly) that individuals receiving state assistance simply had to make their minds up to get a job, no matter how menial, and then their lives would miraculously improve as a result of them thinking more positively about their situation and then acting on it.

Ehrenreich has mentioned elsewhere that many in the public have been resistant to her critiques of what she sees as optimism run amuck in American culture. I’m not surprised to hear this either. I know that the promotion of the power of positive thinking has become a veritable industry in the states to the point that the idea has become a kind of sacred cow.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I really need to get my hands on a copy of Bright-Sided and to have a look at Ehrenreich’s full argument. I’m sure it will give me lots and lots to think about.

I want to blog this really cool musical ensemble called tUnE-yArDs. To help me accomplish this, I’ve included a video of “Bizness,” the sixth track on tUnE-yArDs’ second (and newest) CD, WHOKILL, released in April of this year.

tUnE-yArDs is the brainchild of Merrill Garbus, a thirty-something musical talent who seems to have come out of nowhere to take the Indie music world by storm. I’ll be the first to admit that I knew almost nothing about her and her group until I discovered WHOKILL and was totally blown away by the collection.

I’ve done a few of these musical blogs and always find them extremely challenging. (Thinking about why I like a particular musical group and then trying to verbalize my reasoning is a lot like trying to explain why I’m fond of chocolate ice cream.) I’m fond of chocolate ice cream because I’m fond of chocolate ice cream. (It’s as simple and as complicated as that.) So, I like Merrill Garbus’ music because I like Merrill Garbus’ music.

I can share some of the things I recently learned about Garbus and her band in preparing to write this. tUnE-yArDs started as a one-woman project and she eventually added other musicians to the mix as her compositions became more multidimensional. Until recently, Garbus was totally unknown and (I’m quoting) was so broke that she lived “in a moldy basement and was on food stamps.” She has a background in improvisational theatre and likes to compose and record her songs spontaneously. While in college, Garbus visited Africa on a student-exchange program and has had “a decade-long fascination with Africa and African culture and music.”

I think you can really hear and feel Africa in “Bizness.”

If you’d like to see a pretty video of Garbus “unplugged,” check out this.