Bad Packing & Good Friends

Upon returning from the conference, it was back to other kinds of business in the ATL, where I relished the thing known as an afternoon thunderstorm (they're not so plentiful in Rome this summer). 

And I relished other things, like ethnic and local cuisine.

Yes, there are Chinese, Japanese and Indian restaurants in Rome.  But their number is quite limited. Americans need to not take for granted how ubiquitous the cuisine of assorted 'others' is, at home. 

I'd already sold the car, so I'm still waiting for this mysterious payment.

Nirvana. I can get tots at the Navy commissary here, but they're not going to come with this beautiful burger, blue cheese spread and those gorgeous pickles.  Some Americans living abroad say that the first thing they go for upon their return home is Mexican food.  I did that too, but this meal pictured above may really have my heart. I may or may not have committed a mean act when I sent The Spouse this picture. 

This is the portion of the program in which I have to give a huge shout-out to friends, without whom I wouldn't have accomplished so many things in so little (and in such a crazy-busy) time, both before I actually moved and even after. 

Thanks to the efforts of a singular friend - who I won't name unless she writes to tell me that she wants to be named in this blog - I successfully sold and/or gave away a lot of belongings.  This is, so I'm told, what you have to do when you pack up and move out of the country:  look at every thing you own and determine whether it should a) be stored, b) move with you or c) go away (to trash, to charity, etc). The decision-making alone is fraught with a lot of stress, particularly if you are an artist/academician with a lot of art supplies, books and things that are neither of the former type but are somehow vital to one or both enterprises.  

This process can suck up a lot of time.  Hoping to be mindfully intentional, even when dealing with the third category (go away), more decisions pile up in an overwhelming manner.  Who - or what - gets what? Does this recycle or go into a landfill? Would someone benefit from having a particular item?  How much stuff can I cram into a car to take to a charity drop-off location, and where did I put that tax receipt? 

And don't get me started on how difficult it is to wrangle pick-ups from charitable institutions.  They are so overwhelmed with other people's stuff that they cannot schedule your pick-up for tomorrow.  Or the next day after that.  They might be able to get to you in a week or two.  And even when they agree to schedule that pick-up with you, they might bypass you on that day because they collected too much stuff from preceding clients.  That happened to me, three days before I HAD to be out of an apartment.  And the things that were slated for that pick-up were far too large to put in my car.  

But thanks to that friend - who has other good friends - and a new friend, I made that deadline.  I hope that a certain young music teacher is using those aforementioned items in good health.  

 

I sold my car.  And I didn't buy another one. 

And speaking of my car.  My car!  My third Subaru.  Those who know me well know that I won't drive any other kind of vehicle, in large part after having an accident with a drunk driver who totaled Subaru #2 and left me with one broken bone.  I was able to walk out of a car that had endured a front-end collision at 65mph.  Thus, I bought another one.  I enjoyed driving it for 11 years.

And - thanks again to that friend who knows how to network and spared the time for it, as well as the friendly innkeepers where I stayed - I just sold it.  It's gone to a young woman in the city who, according to her parents, is 'finding her way.'  

For those of you who are wondering whether we'll have a car at all:  we will.  A Prius Compact is on a boat somewhere.  We'll see it in August. (And getting it officially IN the city with all of its proper stickers and whatnot, plus where it will be parked vs. where we're living...that's a future blog post.  Trust me.)

I let go of a lot of belongings over the course of several months as I was preparing for this move. I might have felt a twinge or two over a couple of items (like that flat file...how I will miss my flat file), but handing over the car keys and walking away with only a license plate was the toughest one.  I think that this may have been one of my most 'American' moments in awhile:  to shed a few tears over a car.  Ridiculous? Maybe. To have wheels is to have freedom to go anywhere in a country that, save for a few urban centers or regions, has lousy mass transit.  That 'Scoobie-doo' - as one friendly mechanic called it - saw me through an F1 tornado and resulting baseball-sized hail.  It helped me through three household moves.  It carried hundreds of pumpkins for Academy students to carve during the 8 Halloweens I was their art teacher.  It hauled me and some girlfriends to a favorite island beach getaway multiple times.  It bolstered my rep as a bleeding-heart-liberal-overeducated-middle-class-culture-fiend.  (Tell me that you've seen any other kind of driver behind the wheel of a Subaru...I dare you). 

It never let me down.  A lot of other people, organizations and institutions have let me down.  But that car never, ever did. 

A recent letdown came in the form of unpacking a few things we were allowed to airfreight to ourselves.  But first, the absurdity.  

The Spouse gets a call at the appointed hour.  
He goes out of the apartment to meet the delivery personnel and our boxes.  
I wait in the apartment.  
Time passes.  
More time passes.  
Then, a knock at the front door.   
Visible through the peephole: two large cardboard boxes, two heavily panting, sweating Italian men, and someone I’ve never seen before:  20-something, slim, bespectacled.  
And he says, ‘Hi, I’m (insert The Spouse’s name here).’

??

Surprise! There is another American tenant in our building…who has the same first name as The Spouse.  He lives above us. Our boxes went up two floors too far, initially.  Our portieri are limited with regard to both English, and apparently, keeping track of who lives where.  

And because Italy wouldn't be Italy without bureaucracy, I had to sign in 7 different places on three different forms before those poor breathless men could leave.

And by that point, The Spouse arrived.  
Also breathless. 
"I found the truck, but I couldn't find anyone with it."

**************************

It felt a little like Christmas (the items were boxed in mid-June), especially when I withdrew tongs and a good knife set from the box.  

But the packing of the boxes, generally speaking, was deplorable.  It was performed by ‘professional packers.’

I didn't just take these photos of the recently opened box for the blog.  I'll be submitting a complaint eventually. It makes perfect sense to throw a box of books on top of many other smaller, more fragile items, doesn't it? Realize that this whole container is about 42 inches tall.  There is a ton of things underneath that heavy box.
And see below what they elected to wrap in copious amounts of paper.  

So, let's double or triple wrap things that require no protection, but also toss whole, thick cookbooks in - in a random fashion, so that their spines will be warped. 

Yeah.

Plastic containers deserve a small forest of paper? 

I have to ask:  what happened to basic packing skills?

Grocery shopping challenges here could fill several blog posts, but one difference that I happen to like is the fact that you bag your own groceries.  Yes, I scramble to count out unfamiliar bills and coins while simultaneously bagging my own items (in my own bags, too, because otherwise shoppers pay for plastic bags), but when I get home, my spinach hasn’t been crushed by a heavy glass jar because I used common sense when I put the items in the bag.  Back in the States, I have progressively witnessed an overall decline in bag-packing-skills in paid baggers.  On more than one occasion, I have had to stop -after purchasing and having items bagged but before I left the grocery store – to re-bag most of the items I then felt I could safely place in my car. 

Europeans would say that we're spoiled by even having baggers at all, until they unpacked their spinach.  

A young man who worked in ‘my’ pharmacy in Georgia once mentioned how a local, independent grocery store in town used to stage bagging competitions among the kids who worked there.  Speed, space management and weight distribution skills were prized.  Winners received a small scholarship for college. I'm not sure that they they do this anymore.  

Does anyone get actual training in packing a bag anymore? 

When did it become necessary to train people how to pack a bag in the first place? 

I like the idea of placing value on vocational skills while simultaneously encouraging the acquisition of more intellectual skills, too.  The world isn’t an either/or proposition, really. So when did we decide to prepare people for life only one way or another?

And can someone prepare me for the arrival of the bulk of our belongings in mid-August...bundled up by the same 'professional' packers?  

No, this snarly beastie isn't in Rome - he's in the Asian Art museum in San Francisco.  But he expresses my feelings about bad packing...

To close: a song that I always thought was beautiful, but now has even greater meaning (pardon the video, made by a fan and not the short-lived band).

Pants-less Monkeys

I recently returned to the States in order to attend a conference and also tie up a few loose ends since moving abroad. 

While in Atlanta, I was fortunate to have stayed here, since I’m technically homeless (we’re renting our loft). It’s a wonderful respite after a long flight across the ocean or a long walk in the summer heat.  

It also starkly contrasts with my temporary quarters at the conference in another state:  a single dorm room at a large university.  The typically thin and lumpy mattress.  A sad little pillow.  (I don’t have to provide a picture for these things; most readers will remember them – from camp, from college, from camp AT a college, whatever- all too well.) You think to yourself:  this is a little like the life of a monk. 

Quite worth the relative discomfort, though. And far more social than those who live the cloistered life.

What brought me there?

This. 

More specifically, this was the Reacting to the Past Game Development Conference.  Reacting to the Past is a college-level pedagogy that entails the use of unscripted, complex role-playing games centered around pivotal historical developments informed by seminal texts. 

I have been using this pedagogy in my classes for the last five years, and have authored a full-length game (about the American Artists’ Congress of the 1930s, which takes about five weeks to play), a micro-game (requiring only one class session) and am working on two short games (each encompassing between three and five class sessions). 

This is from my American Artists' Congress playtest at UGA's faculty workshop in April.  Here, American artists are raucously protesting Philip Evergood's (a.k.a. Janice Simon, my advisor from grad school) selection practices for WPA mural commissions.

The Game Development Conference is largely dedicated to game creation – from workshopping concepts to play-testing prototypes.  While other events staged by and for RTTP are intended to introduce faculty to the pedagogy and empower them to adopt it for use in their courses, the GDC serves the game authors.  Presenters are expected to bring less-than-finished work (which requires a certain amount of willingness to risk appearing foolish or lacking in preparation, which is VERY tough for academicians to do) and to then benefit from the generous amounts of feedback that attendees can provide. 

I was scheduled to present twice:  I workshopped my Sistine Chapel Ceiling Restoration game concept, and I also game-mastered my Bomb the Church/Monument microgame.   Some scheduling conflicts for other presenters necessitated my making both presentations on the same (and first) day of the event.  On top of play-testing another person’s game, this made for a very full, intellectually demanding day. I would have been exhausted even without the lingering jetlag. 

As per the usual, I received excellent feedback on both presentations.  Great ideas were generated for my Sistine Chapel game concept, in which the essential conflict is over the ethics and outcomes of the very lengthy restoration of Michelangelo’s frescoes.  I was a little struck by the fact that few people even know there was a controversy.  The playtest of my microgame was a lot of fun, with 26 people getting a more than a little ‘shouty’ over whether to risk life or art.  While I still don’t quite know how to fully incorporate this set of 3D printed artifacts into the game, they – and the game itself - were a hit with the playtesters.

Thanks to a colleague who was cool about teaching me the basics of 3D printing, the availability of a Makerbot and several free printing templates, I crafted some visual elements for my game.  They're not utterly necessary, of course, but for an art game - why not?

All of the pieces fit inside the church.
For more information on my microgame OR my other games comment here with an email address.  I can send the American Artists' game or the microgame (Bomb the Church/Monument) to you for play-testing!  

 So over the course of three days, in three different playtests, I played the roles of curator at the Prado, colonial-era colonel in Virginia, and WWII veteran at the Montgomery Bus Boycott trial.  I attended workshops on game concepts and development. 

The playtest of Verdis Robinson's Bacon's Rebellion game.

Radical artist group 'GAC' speaking to the room of Latin American artists and dealers in Bridget Franco's Prado game.

A fascinating and productive game creation workshop - timed.  And it worked. 

the simple guidelines, steering small groups to game creation

Resulting game construct, with sketched out scenario, roles, etc for a potential game about the ethics of zoos.

And of course, I went to the traditional board game night. 

People who are involved in Reacting are game enthusiasts of one type or another:  some play any and every kind of game (video and otherwise), some are really only enthusiastic about using games in their classrooms, and a fair number are board and card game aficionados.  At the GDC, the latter crowd hauls in a staggering number of games for people to learn and play.  Here are just a few that I (a person who sits somewhere between the middle and latter groups, but mostly closer to the middle) learned to play, this time. 

Nerdy? Sure.  Unapologetically so.  I had a blast.

A collaborative board game, in which all players are racing together to beat the clock and infectious diseases.

A collaborative card game.

If you love storytelling and a game that requires little else but a small book and some index cards, get Microscope.

When building the story, players declare what they want and don't want in the story.

If you love non-linear storytelling (think Coen brothers or Tarantino) AND improv, get this game.  Get it now.  It's also low on necessary components:  a book, some index cards and dice. 

some elements from my group's game, set in 1963, just before a Presidential assassination

It is tough to find a crowd of academicians who are more sincere, more generous or more passionate about revolutionizing collegiate learning and having a good time while doing it.  They are some of the hardest workers on their campuses, who often have higher than average teaching loads, administrative responsibilities of one kind or another, and several other irons in the higher education fire.  They will tirelessly work on revising class preps, researching new game materials and crafting innovative assignments and assessments (often tied to these games, but sometimes tied to other new methods).  They are – at once – often lone users of the pedagogy at institutions staffed with colleagues who zealously guard their lecture content delivery methods (and sometimes cast aspersions on that department member who uses games <insert dramatic eye roll here> in their classes, which can’t be taken seriously)  AND some of the highest regarded (by their students, if not also their peers and supervisors) educators in the academic arena. And perhaps most importantly, what they are doing leads students to higher levels of performance, critical thinking and academic resilience.  It’s not for everyone, to be sure, but isn't this true of any other pedagogy on the planet?

Honors students playing senators in ancient Rome.  Deep in conversation and plotting. It is tough to not be addicted to this kind of scene in the classroom.

So while I may have had to scale way back on my teaching due to a formidable relocation for a few years, I won’t give this particular thing up. It made the last quarter of my 20 years as an educator in Georgia far more interesting and rewarding.  It is probably a significant reason why I received an award at my institution.  It prompted me to take even more educational risks than I was previously taking.  Thanks to Reacting, I believe that I am better able to articulate learning objectives and develop means for students to achieve them.  It also helped me clarify my interests in the area of the scholarship of teaching.  

And it continues to teach me things about all sorts of disciplines.  I will unabashedly admit that I love learning this way.  And we should all want our educators to still love learning.  If they don’t, then who else will?

Just a sampling of the scholarship I've amassed for my American Artists' Congress game. 

Revisit that hyperlink for Reacting to the Past for more information and to find a faculty workshop near you or a game that would suit your content area, if you’re a professor.  And if you’re a parent and it’s time to take that kid on that college visitation tour, ask those recruiters about course content delivery methods.  Ask to sit in on what they consider is a ‘dynamic’ class.  Think about it:  few people work at jobs where they sit and listen to someone talk at them for an hour three times a week and don’t expect them to ever talk back or to each other, or make independent decisions, or reason their way through complex problems.  If that's the case, then why would you have your future-1st-year-college-student endure a minimum of four years of that? 

And if you are neither of those previously mentioned entities, then just read this book.   

Voce II

Italians don’t care about voice mails, I have recently learned.  Any cell plan you can purchase does not include calls you make to listen to voice mail.  You pay 19 cents a minute for that privilege.  And so, no one leaves (or therefore listens to) voice mails.  You text or call someone back, instead.

This is so very strange to me, given that there is such a compulsion to speak here, in a variety of ways.  There is a whole vocabulary of hand gestures.  ‘Yes’ is never said just once…it is emphatically uttered 3 or 4 times when in agreement or confirmation.  Either in person or on the telefonino, speakers repeat ciao several times – interspersed with grazie – at the closure of a conversation.  Explanations of things are quite lengthy.  We spent 90 minutes with our new veterinarian! 

Irrepressible speech is such an ingrained characteristic of this place.

‘Speaking’ statues in Rome are a unique feature of the political landscape.  Two of them are in or near my rione (the one not pictured here is the first of them, named Pasquino)  The statues are ancient fragments of figures that have been ascribed with vocal properties in written form; people wishing to anonymously express political commentary would invent a dialogue between a speaking statue and a conversation partner and post that written dialogue ON or very near the statue, which is often placed at an intersection where pedestrians can read the posts.

This is Abate Luigi (originally an unnamed ancient Roman magistrate)...who once had a head, which apparently never stopped him from 'talking' about political satire.

Not only is there irrepressible speech in Rome, there is at least one irrepressible singer. 

Just recently we revisited my favorite neighborhood in Rome:  Trastevere.  It’s a very medieval section of the city, with little, charming streets laid out in a helter-skelter manner.  College students frequent the area, so while the real estate has gone sky high (the quaint look of the place makes it a fashionable community, with apartments selling for roughly $300,000) you can still get a very affordable meal and good beer.  And three of my favorite churches are here.

One is the church of St. Cecilia, the patron saint of music.

A rather old apse mosaic, coupled with some polychrome marble and this interesting sculpture below the altar.

Cecilia was a wealthy Roman noblewoman who lived in the 2^nd and 3rd centuries AD.  True to tradition (of building Christian worship spaces on the sites of martyrdom), this church is located on the site of the foundation of a 2^nd century Roman house, believed to be Cecilia’s family home.  For a few euros, you can tour the archaeological site below the church. 

Under the altar is Stefano Maderno’s unusual statue of St. Cecilia, depicting her body as it was found upon exhumation – uncorrupted – and twisted in this fashion to display the slit in her neck as well as her hands, positioned to remind us of the Trinity. 

The story of Cecilia’s martyrdom entails some of the usual features of any saint’s experience:  the pagan requirement to renounce faith, the saint’s refusal to do so, some kind of (often inventive) torture to force that renunciation anyway, the saint’s steadfast endurance of that torture and finally, eventual death.  Cecilia’s torturers tried to scald her to death first (inside this church, but rarely available for public viewing, is the stone slab upon which the steaming took place), and she sang instead.  So her throat was slit.  And still…she sang.  For three days. 

Have a look at the church's beautiful courtyard while the campanile bells toll: