Je ne veux pas travailler

Well I don't have to I am retired. Love this song, it is ironic and funny. It came out 20 years ago but it has kept its freshness.





I have also finished reading two other books and started on two others.

I finished the book by Prof. Donald Savoie, Whatever happened to the Music Teacher which tells the tale of how our democracy in Canada has been transformed since 1970 and is now a one man rule with the veneer of Democracy and free elections. Savoie is a well know University Professor and he has written extensively on government operations, Cabinet, the machinery of government and its transformation from the era of Policy driven and Cabinet consensus to a one man show and the continuous measurement of processes. The problem for me is that I saw this happening during my career and know well how things have gone off the rails. Unfortunately the public is so apathetic and so not interested in what is going on that it is quite possible to rule without opposition as our current Prime Minister is doing. Savoie advocates a return to policy initiatives and abandoning the Private Sector approach as ineffective for government operations and also stopping the continues process measurement which is useless and wasteful. It is difficult to do this many politician including the Harper government believe in the miraculous solutions of the private sector in all things governmental.


The other book is a bit of a piece of fluff, not so much a book as a conversation with an elderly aunt.
In this case its Margaret Rhodes, cousin to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. The book The Final Curtsey tells in very general lines, the story of her life, but it is very general and not much details are offered. She speaks mostly of her aunt Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother who was the sister of her mother. She spent her life going from one great house to another, the war years shuffling from Buckingham Palace to Windsor Castle and being a lady in waiting or a lady of the bedchamber to her aunt. There are few passages which are interesting if only as a curiosity, per example she tells us about the day the Queen Mother died and what happened. She died in the late afternoon and Margaret Rhodes was asked by her cousin Queen Elizabeth to come to dinner that night, en famille, at Windsor Castle. The next morning she returned to the house of the Queen Mother and found that the body had been left overnight in her death bed, so a full 12 hours passed before she was taken away by the undertakers. She was also the one to go to Windsor Registry Office to register the death of the Queen Mother. Though you would think the Royals are above such things, not in Britain apparently. The registrar asked Rhodes what was the occupation of the Queen Mother's husband, the question is on the form to be filled out. Taken aback by the question, she hesitated and finally said he was the King.

Her husband Dennys did not appear to work much and it is not clear from what income they lived on. But since they were always with the Royals, they were sort of taken care of. The book of Mary Lady Soames, who is the daughter of Winston Churchill was far more interesting and more in depth, though it also had its moments of vapidity.

It seems that her life was that of an observer not that of an actor, always witnessing never doing much.
She is now 88 years old and lives in a ''grace and favour'' house on the grounds of Windsor Castle.
You come away thinking that Rhodes is not going to say anything nasty or revealing about her cousin the Queen or the Royal Family which is her family and her bread and butter.

I am now reading slowly the book on Prokofiev by David Nice and the book on Machiavelli by Niccolo  Capponi, a descendant of the author of The Prince.
I also want to start reading the book of Gore Vidal, The City and the Pillar, sort of summer reading type of book.

chicken, Prokofiev and humanist painting in Venice

You may well ask what on earth has chicken and Prokofiev have in common or paintings from Venice for that matter. Well it was the weekend, I decided to go and get a chicken for roasting with some sage. Again buying a whole chicken in Rome requires some attention, there are several varieties. Some are plump others look skinny, some are called Ruspante (free-range), other bio, some are produced by large companies and then sometimes local farmers sell to butchers directly. What you will see is a clear preference by shoppers for chickens raised in a yard and eating pretty much what they find on the ground, very old fashion. Chickens can like the many variety of tomatoes on the market and all have very different uses, so if you want to roast a chicken to eat you will buy that type description on label, for soup stock another type, I did find out that if you only want to make stock you cannot buy just any chicken and then throw the bones in a pot, the chicken raised for stock making is tough and can be fatty and not tender. So this time I made sure I bought the right type of roasting chicken, in this recipe I simply put a lot of sage leaves under the skin, a carrot and one coarsely chopped onion inside and simply rub some olive oil on the skin. Sage can be substitute for slices of truffle, it is really very nice.

Brunch at the restaurant of the Chiostro del Bramante, very good. In fact I can say after many years in Rome that they serve the best bacon and eggs in the city.

On Saturday evening we went to hear the orchestra of the Accademia Santa Cecilia under the baton of maestro Vasily Petrenko (34) and singer Ekaterina Semenchuk with the Choir of the Accademia performing the work Aleksander Nevsky by Sergei Prokofiev. This is the music of the film by Sergei Eisenstein. What a delight, I wish I could find the words of the work, so I could read what they were singing about, though there was an excellent synopsis of the story in the program.

the tall cypresses around the Mausoleum of Emperor Augustus and his family.

Then on Sunday morning we went to the Chiostro del Bramante on Via della Pace near Piazza Navona to see an exhibit of painting by great Venician painters like Titian, Tintoretto, Canaletto, Bordone, Pisanello, Veranese, Tiziano and Tiepolo. The Chiostro was built in 1500 by Donato Bramante the great rival of MichaelAngelo and the favorite architect of Pope Julius II. A little aside here, did you know that MichaelAngelo only actually designed the drum of the dome of St-Peter and not the whole church as is often said by guides. The Basilica took 100 years to build and MichaelAngelo was very old when he got involved.

Piazza Navona at 3pm on Sunday afternoon.

Piazza del Popolo at 4pm on Sunday.

Again a wealth of riches and very interesting with its mix of religious and lay subjects covering the period between 1460 to 1760, for Venice a period of great commercial wealth and power followed by a period of deep schism with the Papacy in Rome over the appointments of Bishops, creating an isolation from Europe for the Serenissima and finally slowly its eclipse and fall with the arrival of the French army of Napoleon. From Humanist painting to the  mannerist style to the baroque.  It complemented well the exhibition on Il Bronzino we saw in Florence a week ago. With the development of affluent and powerful families who wanted portraits of themselves, painters now had another outlet, previously the Church had a virtual monopoly on painters and what they could paint. It is interesting to see through the late Middle Ages to early Renaissance how taste changed. Technique and style also improved greatly, the exhibit was arranged in chronological order so that you could see the evolution, say between 1480 and 1523 quite a difference, refinements in the work and the subject, no longer the flat austere tableaux.
It is also nice to see painters getting away from the tedium of religious art, seriously how many Madonna and Child or crucifixion can one look at, after a while it all looks the same.

Another beautiful day in Rome.