Assisi

Ok, due to my complete lack of timing and political coordination, I’m going to skip past the few adventures that I haven’t got to yet because if I don’t then I’m going to get bogged down and never write everything down, which would be a tragedy in itself. So I’m going to start fresh today, with our trip to the pleasant little town of Assisi.

I didn’t really know much about Assisi up until I read the chapters that I was told to read, a week late no less. Apparently it is a very religious little town, holding the very center of the Franciscan order, started by St. Francis himself. Old Francis was apparently a party dude up until he decided to change his ways and follow the Lord. He went and asked the Popey for permission, and the Popey saw it as a chance to reunite the people and the church, which was struggling thanks to it’s dominating presence in society. Basically, the church was the society. This was back in the Ages of Middle. Anyway, Francis did all this stuff and it was actually very interesting.

So we got to Assisi by bus, which is pretty great because we all fall fast asleep for the duration and feel energized when we get to the place. Anyway, we arrived not 100 feet from St. Francis Cathedral, which is pretty impressive. Impressive for the fact that it is essentially a church on top of another church, but also impressive for how mean and strict all the monks and authorities were. No pictures, no talking, no admiration of the building, no entertainment whatsoever. It was pretty crazy actually. They are sitting in one of the more important churches in the country, full of very powerful and amazing frescos and sculptures, and they only way you can remember it is if you buy an overpriced postcard. There is something sneakingly evil about that.

Anyway, we followed Paolo, our ridiculously brilliant tour guide and teacher, around for a good while, up hills and through the town, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Assisi is a lot like a bigger Castiglion Fiorentino. It’s quite hilly and everything seems to have been built according to what was already there, not by some master plan at all. There must have been some fancy thing on though because there were merchants all over the place, selling everything from neon green socks to frying pans to puppies.

The tour ended up at the restaurant that we were to eat at. Thankfully our meal was free this trip, so we were all pretty happy. I sat with the usual suspects, in between Melissa and Haley, so I was happy. Now, to fully appreciate the situation I’m going to have to explain the day previous, so bear with me for a minute.

Yesterday, our second project was due in studio. We had to do an artistic representation of our first project, the 6 meter cube thing. Anyway, we all came up with things to describe how we felt going through the project and how to represent it somehow. And that was where everything started going bad. We all had to talk to Peter Lang about our projects, at first as an initial concept and then on going throughout our development. Knowing Lang and his idiotic take on perfection and art in general, I decided to kinda experiment with this idea. I told him my initial plan for the project, which I thought was decent and would work well for me, and I was extremely confident about it when telling him, which I’ve found is the only way to deal with Lang. Every question he had I would answer, even if I just made something up. He approved my idea on the sole basis that he thought that I knew what I was doing. And I didn’t talk to him once more until the project was due. Everyone else met with him 4 or 5 more times, each with similar results. Lang has this uncanny ability to change his mind each time he talks to you, so you never have a clear idea about what he wants or what you should do to make him understand you. Every person I talked to about it was supremely mad and wanted to either punch him in the face (which I recommended) or give up and do what he wanted. Unfortunately a lot of the people in studio took the second road and took so many “suggestions” from Lang that the project was no longer there’s. A few people didn’t, mainly Haley who my respect for grows daily, and I think their projects were the strongest. After one of her sessions with Lang, she came over to us nearly in tears, and told us that she had basically told Lang to stick his ideas and leave her alone. How is a project hers if she has no input into it? She fits into the story too.

Anyway, sorry, I’m sidetracking. So these projects were due yesterday and nobody was really excited about them. We really weren’t excited about the fact that we were going to have an “important” Greek artist come to the review either. This lady, if you can call her that, has destroyed everything I thought about the Greeks. I thought they were all athletic and artistic, but no. She was large, mean, and completely lacking any sort of artistic talent whatsoever. The first few projects went through without many problems, everyone was nice and pleasant. But then all of a sudden the Greek lady started getting really critical and mean about “our” projects. She called some of them childish and stupid, and even went as far as to say that they had no meaning. This is where Melissa and the story comes in. We got to Melissa’s project, which was a taste-testing thing to display how everyone has different descriptions for similar things, and the lady was one of the tasters. She went through the project, not saying a positive word the entire time, and by the end of it she basically called it a gameshow that had been done before. Melissa started crying and then this crap of a woman feigns sympathy for her. I stayed with Melissa the whole time and I was ready for punching the Greek lady in the face. She finally left to see other projects, but not before promising to work with Melissa on her project the next day in Assisi.

Fast forward a bit to my project, which Lang introduced as “an independent work” so he apparently got the idea. I made a movie from clips on the DVDs that I brought with me. It was rather funny in parts, but also really intense and serious. I thought it came out really well. Anyway, it finished and the lights came on and I got a round of applause, the only one of the day, and nobody said anything. Haley, my little co-criminal, said “Bravo” and I said thanks. Paolo, who was in there too, said that it was really well done with the sequencing and the editing, which was great to hear from him. Any compliment from him means a ton. But not a word from the Greek or from Lang. There were some subtle undertones to my movie too, mostly directed at Lang, and I think he might have picked up on them. Anyway, I explained my ideas for a while and everyone was happy. I think it turned out really good.

So Greek lady made a horrid impression on pretty much everyone there. And you can imagine our expressions when we saw her walk through the door of the restaurant. Melissa’s eyes watered over and I nearly choked on some pasta, which is hard to do. I did not want to talk to Lang at all today, and even less was my desire to communicate with that other thing. (I know this sounds horrible, but she really was one of the worst humans I’ve ever met, so full of herself that she believes her work with Gypsy farms is phenomenal and groundbreaking. Whatever.) Anyway, I quickly started hatching a plan to escape before Lang captured us for the afternoon, surely to show us graffiti on a dumpster or maybe a single Coke can in a field of dead grass or something along those lines. To my surprise, Haley was really on board with all of this, apparently feeding off the extreme dislike of Lang too. The only problem was Melissa, who we were basically doing all this for anyway. We didn’t want Melissa to have to go through another afternoon of crap with this woman, so we wanted to get her out into the town and get her mind off the whole thing. Trouble was, the Greek lady had already come over and talked to Melissa, saying that they would work after lunch.

Anyway, our plan was set into motion as Lang headed out the door to the upper balcony. Haley, Melissa, and I shot out downstairs, right underneath the balcony with Lang and the devil lady. It was pretty great actually. The feeling of rebelling and actually standing up for what we believed in, not this tripe that he was trying to feed us, was fantastic. And having my friends there with me, feeling the same thing I was feeling was almost overwhelming. Short lived was our three though, as Melissa cracked under the pressure, that pressure to follow what we’ve been told to follow for so long, and she said that she couldn’t just leave. Haley and I tried to convince her, but I don’t think she was ready for it just then. So she went back. And Haley and I left together, off to wander the city with no real goals or direction, just the odd bond of two people understanding that what we just did was bigger than both of us. Rebelling against “authority” is never something one would recommend, but sometimes you have to stand up for yourself and your ideas, just as Haley and I did.

So I spent the afternoon with Haley, a girl I know more about now than I did 24 hours ago, and a girl I have so much more respect for now. We met up with other groups of people, but it would always be us two together going places and deciding what we wanted to do, and I couldn’t have been happier. We even went into Santa Chiara together, a big church outside our meeting place, and went down into the crypt together, more amazed by the ceilings than anything else. We came up laughing and realized that maybe that wasn’t the best thing to do coming out of a crypt. Just another story to tell, that’s all.

And that was Assisi, and my day. Tonight will hold a movie, Monty Python, and probably out to the pub to hang out for a while. And I can’t wait.