The 'don'ts' in Italy

Piazzo San Marco is no place for football, bare chests.

More Piazza San Marco. They've established no thoughtful sitting, but what about, like, casual sitting?

The hall to the bathroom in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence. These are every ten feet or so.

Ponte Vecchio, Florence. What's the lire/euro exchange rate these days?

Putin's certain victory begins an uncertain era

So, the ballots have been cast, the numbers have been revealed, the tears have been shed, and the political reality for Russia for the next six years is, despite months of protest, precisely what is was when Putin and Medvedev announced they were swapping jobs. About the actual voting and whether or not the totals bear any resemblance to reality, I am capable of no sensible opinion. Putin probably would have won cleanly, but I still don't buy that there was no funny business.

Following things closely through these months, two things strike me. The first is the extent of the panic response from Putin, which shows clearly that the groundswell of opposition in the cities registered on his reptilian fear sensors. To an amazing degree, the establishment trotted out the familiar lines of anti-Americanism and retro appeals to the security of a state surrounded by hostile powers. This is the reliable old playbook from the 1920s.

The second is about the new role of the Internet in Russian life. For years, on LiveJournal and Twitter and other sites there have been rumblings of dissent that never seemed to gather any steam. All that changed in the past few months. Throughout the campaign I was wondering when we would see the government tighten its hold on new media, even as we saw state television go full in the bag, and pressure ratchet up on independent news sources like Ekho Moskvy. Would we see a ham-handed clampdown like the ill-fated Mubarak regime last year? or something more successfully sinister like in Iran, or sophisticated as in China? As I understand it, there was nothing of the sort at all. The Internet appears to remain open and free, which makes me wonder whether the Russian government is even capable of bringing it to heel if it wishes. That makes for a fascinating new normal in Russia.

It will be incredibly interesting to see how Putin chooses to govern over the next, sigh, six years. Will he keep up the paranoid thundering about enemies foreign and domestic at Volume level 11? does the nation have the stamina for another generation of such toxic nonsense? does Putin have, somewhere, a better angel of his nature that realizes he doesn't need to push the boot down quite so much, that the dissenters can grouse and groan all they want but can't change the political reality that the voters need not be consulted for another five years? And what if, once beautiful weather arrives, the protesters decide that they've developed a taste for expressing their views and continue to go into the streets?

And exactly how does he plan to ward off the danger of Brezhnevian stagnation? in the campaign, he promised the moon and the stars to the electorate -- and as long as oil prices remain preposterously high, he can deliver to a certain extent. But if something unforeseen happens, then what?

At this depressing moment, there are plenty of reasons to be doubtful and gloomy. But there are enough questions still open to suggest there may be surprises in the future.

'A manufactured image, with no philosophies...'

The untimely and sad passing of Davy Jones got me thinking about how amazing it is that any conversation about the Monkees has to involve an incredibly amount of effort spent in defending why one might like them. The Prefab Four? from that kid's t.v. show? Yea, you can hum most of their songs, but that's what your weird aunt listens to. But this, even though a list of serious artists not only refused to thrown them under the bus, but had nice things to say about them -- Jerry Garcia, Frank Zappa, Neil Young, the friggin' Beatles. Sure, no one would mistake them for the Beatles, but.... so?

The endurance of the Monkees beyond their generation would seem to prove there is value in durability. My generation and I found them when they began appearing in the late 1980s on MTV and Nickelodeon -- two networks that still had some capacity to shape opinions back in the old set-top cable box days. We saw them as hokey, a bit cheesy, but catchy in a way that felt they'd been around forever. And certainly much different than anything else that would have come across our field of vision. They were for many of us, perhaps, the first hint that rock and pop music had a history, that our culture was more than what we saw around us.

And it was hard to miss that they were professionals, and seemed to have a healthy sense of perspective about what they were about. And it was terribly interesting how their SoCal cheekiness was a running theme and variation on the specific stereotypes they were supposed to fit. Davy, "the cute one," was self-deprecating, funny and too short for his designated role. Mickey, "the funny one," was the best singer, even though he was the alleged drummer. Peter was the "shy one," and always seemed sad and distracted. He and Michael Nesmith, the "smart one," perfected a kind of cool, there-but-not-there vibe that played well off the earnest eager-to-please approach of Jones and Dolenz. I think they might have invented irony as we know it.

And it interesting how int he course of their short career the music changed, going from a wholly produced canned thing to something that could credibly be called their own sound. My favorite song was a Nesmith number, "The Girl that I Knew Somewhere," from their later phase. I also remember always liking the early song "Saturday's Child," which was written by the guy from Bread and was such a session production it barely counts as a Monkees song -- Dolenz was the only Monkee credited with doing anything on the track. Its lyrics are silly, but it has a very heavy guitar riff and backup harmonies that feel like they shouldn't be in the same song. I also always liked "She" and "Words," which were intense enough that you'd think they should have come from a different band. They did have an amazing capacity to squirm away from what you thought they were about. I actually once sat through Head, their insane version of A Hard Day's Night, which zoomed straight through funny into very strange.



An important question the film raises is why it is so hard to accept them for what they were. "The prefab four," shameless Beatles knock-off aimed at cashing in on the British Invasion. All these points are conceded, but you say it like that's a bad thing... I feel bad for those that can't see how untangling all this is fun. The American entertainment establishment responding to American audiences responding to young British bands responding to American rock and roll. Or, as Mike said in Head, "You think they call us plastic now, babe, wait 'til I get through telling them how we do it."