0608 Step Twelve - Seattle (last stop)

I noticed that in every city someone left a message hanging on the walls for me. Someone who wanted to make me think. Think about myself and my life. Thank you, whoever you are. This was the message in Seattle:

All around Seattle the nature - the lake, the mountains, the Puget Sound - is beautiful. From now on I see more beauty in downtown Seattle too. Sometimes beauty is a state of mind. This sky for instance now to me looks like a Magritte or a Kandinsky painting - I even see a couple flying in that sky holding each other hands (do you?) 

A few steps away the phone rings. I answer the phone. A voice says: goes to the Public Market. I hang up and think: why not?

The Public Market is a colorful place where you can buy fruit and fishes. It's lunchtime, I am hungry, I go the restaurant. They make me sit upstairs. There is a nice view. 

At the table in front of me there is a couple. They sit on the same side of the table, they talk and look into each other's eyes and smile and from time to time they hug and kiss each other. Then they go. holding each other's hands. Where did they go? Maybe in a place where they could give each other more kisses. Love is a beautiful thing. It can be painful too. But it is beautiful.

When I leave the restaurant I see this wall:

One wall, two different pieces, next to each other. At zero distance. I think that maybe love is this: to be one and two at the same time.

After this deep thought it's time to go. I leave Seattle even if I would like to stay, perhaps escape on the Rocky Mountains. But I follow the line that takes me elsewhere.

But where I will really go from here, I don't know. Sometimes your mind goes one way and your body the other way. I think I know where I want to bring my mind and body but it will take some time. How long? Maybe I should ask Alexander, the man who knows everything. Or maybe not, and keep on traveling my journey to Ithaca.

 

0508 Step Eleven - San Francisco

At the four corners of Union Square in San Francisco there are four hearts and four thousand homeless. There is much more poverty than love, in San Francisco and everywhere else, even if there isn't any reason for that.

Then on Friday evening all those who have a second home somewhere on the beach or the mountains or the desert go away and leave the homeless alone. The parking lots are empty, quiet, sad, beautifully sad. Also the streets become empty.

So you can read better the messages left there for you. It's my life. How do I want to live it?

It's all about me. They want to make me feel important. They are trying to sell me something.

And now that I found love, what else I need? The courage to go for it and embrace it and cherish it and share it and enjoy it, perhaps?

Or maybe I just need a laundry. You bring them your shirts which smell of your body, of dust from the street, of your efforts to be a human being, all of your hopes and dreams. And they give you back clean, no-smell shirts so you can put them in your bag and go somewhere else and start all over again.

 

Interlude 7 - the Prius

The Prius is one of the most popular cars in California, and especially in Los Angeles. They say it's eco-chic, maybe also Los Angeles is eco-chic and for that they go along well. For me it is the equivalent of the iPod: clever, simple, functional, the design is not as beautiful as the iPod but still good, the car helps protecting the environment, its manufacturer Toyota is becoming world number one, and I am happy that they were brave enough to make it (and now with prices of gas sky-rocketing everybody wants to invest in the business of hybrid cars).   

0508 Step Ten - Los Angeles

There is a French bistrot that I like in Melrose Avenue, between West Hollywood and Beverly Hills. I know, it's French, I know... but there are a few things (not many) that French do decently - cheese and wine as an example. In this case, I love their organic mint lemonade. Plus the little birds that come to look for food (they usually go first to the Italian restaurants nearby and if they can't find anything there as a second best they go for the French).

After the lemonade I walk and visit showrooms in Beverly Hills and sometimes I see myself in the window (sometimes even twice) and then I ask myself: what am I doing here? 

Then a sign on the street reminds me that there are dreams to follow and this makes me feel better.

In the evening the Lakers play and win. Eeverybody is delighted by Kobe Briant and everybody in LA is happy to have the catalan Pau Gasol in the team. His arrival gave the team a  boost and took it to a new level. Now they will play for the title. 

  

After the game the sun goes down on Santa Monica Boulevard. Tomorrow I will be somewhere else and someone else will look at the sunset from this same window.

0508 Step Nine - Austin

Austin is the black sheep of Texas. Laid-back, relaxed, tolerant, almost arty... I like it. I like 5th street and the night atmosphere. But this time I arrived too late at night thanks to a delayed flight and there was nobody on the street. So I went to the gym. There are things that you know you need to do and it doesn't matter the time.

  

I like Austin because the girls and boys of the Burnet Middle School thought about Darfur and made this tent to tell everybody that we should do something to help the people of Sudan. Pity their President is too busy to help the people of the oil companies to make the largest profits of their history. Everybody has his own mission.

 

Then I also like Austin because there is a bistrot where they have the picture of the leaning tower on the wall. I am from Pisa, it makes me feel proud. I just don't know about those toilet papers.

And finally, I have a question for Jenner. Jenner, you wrote it in concrete.... but do you still love Ratfink now? (the other question would be, is it really possible to love someone called Ratfink?)

Interlude 6 - the iPod

Thank you Apple for designing the iPod. It is beautiful and functional, a marvelous idea. For someone like me who at 15 was saving money (at that time, 1,5 euro for a LP) only to buy music that I could only listen at home at nighttime when everybody else in the house was in bed to be able to enjoy it in peace it is still hard to believe that you can carry in your pocket all the music that you want and you can listen to it when you want (ok, the quality is not the same, but you can't have everything). I like to listen to my music when I travel, it is a great company and a precious gift, especially in certain days.

I am just worried about all this people who listen to their iPod on the street and don't talk with anybody and if a truck runs over them they don't even realize it until it hits them - and the last thing they hear is Madonna who sings Give it to me.

Now in America they sell the iPod even in the streets with this machine.

0508 Step Eight - Dallas

Dallas is money and power and big portions and there is no center, what there is is a lot of space and wide roads and none of them goes to the city center because it doesn't exist.

But there is a new hotel which is very interesting. They claim that they wanted to mix Donatella Versace with George Clooney and see what could possibly happen. Despite the slightly stupid declaration of intents, the hotel tourned out nice. It is called Z Hotel (perhaps the suggestion here is that is the next step after the W Hotel). I slept with Ray Charles.

The good thing is that they make clear at the entrance that you can't enter the hotel with a gun in your pocket, which is something that makes you feel safer. At the same time, the fact that they felt obliged to establish that rule makes you feel that a lot of people in Dallas, Texas must be walking around with guns in their pocket so you feel safe in the hotel but not so safe outside of it.

The hotel has this ethnic-eclectic mix that is considerably in fashion nowadays and there was this Chinese corner on my floor

 

and that Chinese corner created a Pavlovian effect on me so one minute later I was enjoying my fried dim-sum, and two minutes later I was on another plane.

 

0508 Step Seven - Miami

Miami, Cuba, Art-deco, Calle Ocho, South Beach, and yes it is hot (but it was raining, there were thunderstorms) so they keep you fresh on the street

So when you have your sushi outside you feel comfortable

Miami, pink flamingos and a funny way to promote products, if you like pink flamingos you have a discount

Miami and a sign on a church that says that God is still speaking... and I think that He never goes quiet for those who have ears

 

Miami and when I went with Giorgio to the Delano and we were talking about Starck and his way to play with out-of-scale objects to push us to re-think about our perception of the reality, his theatrical way to create ambiences, and now I went to the Delano again but without Giorgio wasn't fun

Miami and when Victor was living there and he was giving me the keys of his car and I was driving up and down Florida and he didn't care. Now I rent a car and this is me with my Montecristo and my (temporarily mine) white car

Miami and I am ready to go, I am inside the temporary white car (white forever, temporarily mine), on our way to the airport

Miami and the Florida highway where once years ago I listened to some music all day while driving to Orlando and back to Miami and then I decided to make a CD of that music for my friends because that day I was thinking of them, and some of them liked it

But the streets in Florida break down, like many other streets in many other places of the world, so when you drive in Florida you have to pay attention that the street doesn't break down under your wheels otherwise you may go down in a big hole and re-emerge in China.

0805 Step Six - Cincinnati

Many years ago I drove on a Friday night from Chicago through Indiana to Defiance, Ohio to meet someone there. It was an incredible experience of deep, rural, rough America. They all had cowboy's hats and boots, they were all rock and folk, and they didn't like strangers. This time my trip to Ohio was easy and flat, apart from a very interesting business meeting (nice to know that someone promote high-quality modern design over there) and the Art Center designed by Zaha Hadid who is a fantastic architect:

  

It was an open night with DJ's and free access and drinks for the visitors (nice to know that someone works to make modern art accessible there). I was impressed by the work of two artists: Radcliffe Bailey:

 

and An-My Le. She is a Vietnamese photographer whose main subject is war - but from a different angle. One collection of pictures - called Small Wars - is dedicated to people who dress up like soldiers and re-create scenes of the Nam war on Sunday mornings, the other one - called 29 Palms, from the name of a Marine Training Facility in California where they prepare soldiers to the Iraq war and is not too far away from Hollywood - makes you think about war as a show that we enjoy from the screen of our televisions. By depicting the war as a game or as a show she underlines the hidden side of it, the terrible, illogical, barbarian side, the dark side of humanity.

  

It was raining in Cincinnati - it was raining all over America this time. And this is me reflected for a moment on the wet street, a street somewhere down in Ohio that maybe, like so many other streets, like the streets in Defiance or who knows where, I will never cross again.