If you’re in Paris and need a morning break from the Right Bank’s pomp and glamour, you needn’t go all that far. Just cross the river Seine to the tamer, quainter, bohemian Left Bank and treat yourself to a walking expedition.
Our final stop in Italy is Florence. The glamorous city is abuzz with tourism and, consequently, commerce in these Spring months.
The famous San Lorenzo leather market is bursting with colorful scarves, leather jackets and bags.
Echo Park is the perfect place to have an art walk (preferably during the day, before the Tec-9 fire/stabbings erupt). It’s also a somewhat chaotic affair, strung throughout suburbs surrounding the local paddleboat haven/mini-tropical Watts: galleries in garages and lofts; museums in backyards, and hawkers peddling hand-crafted wares in front of their houses. Obviously it ain’t like walking into your local MOCA/MOMA, especially since the actual ‘museum’ is 2+ miles long and a good 15 degrees hotter.
And pleasantly disorienting: my accomplice and I got lost almost immediately; thank god those starving artists had child laborers to provide us with chalk drawing-maps and cotton candy!
No Cinco de Mayo party would be complete without music, tacos, and an arsenal of Mexican wrestlers, that’s why I chose to celebrate mine at Nomad Collective Art Compound. The Los Angeles-based studio known for hosting a variety of diverse events rented a regulation size wresting ring and rallied the most authentic taco chefs they could find for an event they called “Lucha Lounge.”
Three hours outside of Rome is Pompeii, the once-flourishing pleasure center which was famously destroyed [and preserved] by an eruption of the nearby Vesuvius volcano. Pompeii’s sudden, violent end by heat and rain of volcanic ash lent archeologists a unique perspective into life 5,000 years ago. Because the city was buried in under six hours, it became an archeological goldmine hundreds of years later, when it was first rediscovered in 1599. Amusingly, the frescoes that were first unearthed back then were considered so obscene in nature, that they were quickly buried again, to protect the strict moral codes of the time.
In the center of Rome looms the Vatican – the holy sovereign city within a city, world’s smallest state, heart of Catholicism, subject of media scrutiny, surrounded by a wall of speculation as thick as the actual stone wall surrounding it. Inside, museums filled with innumerable cultural treasures, St. Peter’s Basilica – arguably the most breathtaking Catholic church in existence, and, of course, more pope paraphernalia than you can shake a gilded staff at.
Earlier this week, I inhaled my year’s quota of aerosol paint fumes as I watched some of today’s best Graffiti artists scramble to put the finishing touches on plywood reinforced walls at Little Tokyo’s Hold Up Art. The artfully spray painted walls are part of this month’s “Hi-Graff,” an installation-based street art exposition set to explore the concept of Graffiti as a contemporary art movement.
You don’t get to feel a city’s pulse until you’ve been trapped on a few of its highways. To understand what I mean, do this: wake up in the fog-dipped countryside, speed through the open space of sparsely populated fields, then past the first signs of industry – factories, pristine and painted in candy colors or splattered with graffiti, past car dealerships and low-income suburbs, until the highway is choking on traffic and you’re stopped at a toll booth, the humming city emerging at this final checkpoint. Now we’re ready to enter Rome.
When presented with the dilemma of choosing Roman wonders to stuff into one day, the simplest approach is to consult any list of Rome’s top most visited attractions. Among them, you’ll find The Colosseum, the Sistine Chapel, Piazza Navona and the Roman Forum. Not that I’m suggesting to necessarily go for the obvious. Not at all! In this case, however, each of these places are areas of great personal interest, and I’m prepared to suffer the heat to see them.
Two weeks ago it was time for San Francicso’s comics convention, WonderCon – and what’s a giant, gleeful nerd-out without its afterparties? The party selection was plentiful this year, but, as always, time is the enemy. Decisions had to be made, and one of my choices for after-con-fun-time was the Burlesque reception at San Francisco’s brand-new Artifact Gallery. A choice I shan’t regret, despite getting lost walking to and from the party. These things happen, and I am grateful to the kindly hobo who helped us find our way home.