Showing posts with label Roma. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Roma. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Non Vedo L'Ora=I Can't Wait!

"I'm flying on a jet plane.
Don't know when I'll be back again!"





I'm going to Bella Roma on Thursday evening. Up, up and away!

Here's why:

Juliana Beasley Lectures at Festival Internazionale di Roma

Host:
Zonettive
Type:
Network:
Global
Date:
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Time:
5:00pm - 6:00pm
Location:
Palazzo delle Esposizioni
Street:
Via Nazionale, 194
Phone:
390670473528
Email:

Description

Juliana Beasley will lecture on the making and experiences gained during the six years of photographing in Rockaway Park in Queens, NYC.

Ms. Beasley will tell various anecdotes about her subjects and how she built intimate relationship with them book over the years for the book in progress entitled "Last Stop: Rockaway Park".


I am thrilled. Can't wait to be back in Rome. My first love. I haven't been to Italy since 1998 when I was en route to Albania. I haven't been to Rome since I thought at 24, I would live there and within a week, I would own a Vespa, have a great Italian boyfriend with coffee colored hair, a job in photo and a room in an apartment.

Well, Rome bit me in the ass! And I left went to Florence, then froze in a compartment of a train all the way to Vienna, lived with a sadomasochistic self-cutting artist named Richard whom I had met in Frankfurt. It was so cold that winter, his heat was so not working and I slept next to an open gas oven and obsessed about sticking my head in all the way to put me out of my misery. And then his Turkish fiancee showed up and that really changed the tone of things despite, the friend Marc who was addicted to opium and wanted to get us all high.

I finally left, met up with an NYU buddy, we had sex after drinking to much alcohol after dancing to music on a transiter radio until, we spent the rest of the night bowing over a shared Austrian toilet. The next day we got up early, got on a train down to Belgrade, photographed Serbian refugees from the north. I ate the worst pizza of my life, froze again and then in two days we left on a train back to Vienna. Everyone loved her in Belgrade. It seemed no one cared a rat's ass about me.


But, now in 2009, I have a purpose. I see myself doing a jig, playing the real hee-haw American, charming them beyond the Lawrence Welk shows of my childhood. And then, I will fall into a beautiful opera in Italian about Rockaway Park and all will applaud as if I was far better than Ms. Boil. I will be the personification of the native New Yorker. Just like the song, I'll brake out into the hustle. Every so, often I will say something in English with a strong Italian accent.


On my off hours between interviews and ice cold cappuccinos, I'll sit on the Spanish Steps, write in my journal and wonder why so many men lean on their motorcylcles and scratch their balls through their jeans.