November 6, 2015, Venice (Day 2)

I probably can’t keep on posting shit for every day I’m gone. I’m really enjoying this exercise in writing and documenting stuff, but it’s a little much. We’ll see…

So, highlights of Venice for day 2.

It’s the music, surprisingly. At this point, I’m pretty much done with canals, tourist hordes, and grouchy Venetians. Shit is also expensive; they will charge your ass an entry fee for anything of any kind of significance or beauty (except for churches, where it’s an offering, or more fees inside.) (Relevant tangent; one of the first things the cruise tour guide told our group, was that Venetians are grouchy, and to stay on the right side of narrow streets cause they’ll yell at your ass to get out the way. DC, metro escalators, something something…)

OK, back to music. November 6, Venice Jazz Club. Great jazz from the house band. 4 piece- bass, keys, drums, guitar. I feel pretty familiar this this uniquely American form. I’ve heard talent in places like the Blue Note and Kennedy Center… and never would’ve thought some random canal in the middle of Venice would make an appearance on the list of places as memorable to me as those. This particular night was a tribute to Latin jazz- including samba, bossa, and afro-cuban tunes. A few particularly memorable things.

The drummer had a bunch of instruments made of out of trash or household objects that were to say the least, surprising. That’s the featured picture. A guiro from a cheese grater, rattles made out of bottle caps, and the most impressive was a shaker made out of 2 old drum heads taped together and filled with sand. With basically garbage, the drummer was able to reproduce the sound of ocean breakers crashing into a shoreline, better than I’ve heard anywhere in a live setting. That, and also pretty legit squid ink pasta with grilled squid. Altogether, pretty good night. A few more pics below.

One more thing. This is the diatribe on the slow-motion tragedy of tourism in Venice. I rode the ferry back to Giudecca with the guitar player, and had a pretty interesting conversation about history and art in the city. He’s a local, born and raised in Venice. We were chatting about the effect of tourism on Venice… the demographic changes are tangible and pretty tragic. Since 1966, the population of Venice has more than halved, from about 120,000 to less than 60,000. The social and cultural impact is less quantifiable, but I feel like it’s also pretty tangible. Tourists, en masse, are cancerous. I mean, I’m contributing to it, so frankly, I’m also culpable here. There are a some tragic effects… the first is the dilution and commodification of culture, community, and history. The subsequent  and natural outcome of this is the effect this has on the local population… I think they’re understandably, not happy about it, but that’s expressed in varying ways, and with varying assertiveness. There’s not a lot of choice in whether to engage in tourism, because that’s basically the entire economy. You still have to put food on the table and put a roof over your head. And the callous and clueless tourists from US, China, wherever, are bringing in the coin. So there’s just a slow motion erosion of the “Veniceness” or Venice I think. And I’m not sure if there’s something or someone you can blame- this get’s to a related issue about group or community liability or culpability, and various constructions of individuality and freedom but that’s another whole problem. I mean, you can’t blame the individual tourist for going to Venice. And you can’t blame the individual Venetian for engaging in transactions with tourists. I think you can blame people for being assholes though, so there’s that.  Be nice…