Meeting Mendizabal

It's early night when Alex and me take the bridge and walk along a canal to an area that generally is known as Sint-Jacobs. Not too many people know that it used to be a graveyard, that it used to be a highlight on the way to Compostella for people living further north, that it used to be known as Butter Market after the graveyard became far too small for the masses that went on dying without anyone being clever enough not to do so, that it used to have houses where writers resided and that Ottogracht had been a canal of course before it became a street and that the wellknown Exotic Gardens, during at least half of nineteenth century one of the biggest in Europe, where just the other side of that canal.
Alex lives in Rome for quite a while now, after he lived in San Sebastian, where he spent his youth, in Lybia, in New York, and partly because of that dining at the trattoria near Sint-Jacobs at first seemed a silly idea as he doubtlessly knew dozens and dozens and dozens of similar places all over Italy. La trattoria nevertheless is one of my favourite restaurants and it had walking distance. On YouTube we had been looking at Sebastian Mendizabal during a last year fight, which he won, clever on fis feet, his fists rather low, far beneath the chest, producing whenever he hit major speed. Alex admitted that he couldn't stand Sebastian doing these things, but fairly enough he quite often joined the boxing spectacle, looking at his son beating Xavi in two rounds. Waiting for the vongole we stumble on Pasolini. As for Alex, Pasolini is his favourite artist. Het gesprek komt op Uccellacci e uccellini, met Toto en Ninetto. Art became quite similar to religion, Alex says, after said many other things. The face of Pier Paolo though is above all that: Giotto. Art is a failure not because of the thing. Economy and policy destroy it and destroy it with any artist it gets.

In 1995 he and his wife settled in New York. He has a sheet with names and dates of directors who make silent movies. He writes all or at least most of them with the abrupt remark: I can make your silent movie more silent.

- I can make your silent movie more silent.
- How?
- Sir, by burning all of its copies.

He got the thing and started to work with Jonas Mekas.