Long walk around some unfamiliar parts of the city on a warm spring day. Political festival was in the streets by the Sbux that I had mentally figured on for a post-Passion Sunday Americano, so I ducked into the one in the tourist quarter for a bit. Very scrupulously avoiding all the politics--didn't even leave the rooms on the day of the big rally last month. Ended up taking a long loop around the new city. Many miles circling, after the 2 hr. direct walk in. Absolutely exhausted at the end.
The background music at the cafes and stores here is odd. Basically the 1980s AM radio catalogue, almost invariably in English, but redone, evened out, usually heavily auto-tuned, likely by artists signing away perpetual worldwide rights in exchange for the delivered lunch and the demo tape. A cult of authenticity, and close listening to phonographs might be opportune hereabouts. Some exceptions to the muddle: I still treasure the moment in which I walked into an underground grocery at an intersection, and the Gypsy Kings' "A Mi Manera" started up. But for the most part, English. A bit like the Christmas fair music in Hungarian Romanian Transylvania, also almost invariably in English. The relics of St. Nicholas were after all, translated to the trade center of Bari, and became a merchant cult. The saintly gift-giving bishop. In many places hereabouts, Latin Christianity stands for commerce, and the old empires of the north.
All things to all people. Actually, this is the need for the universal church, one not defined by any understanding of it outside its central truths. Even though it does exist to these people principally through the means of these understandings. But the phenomenological context also bears the mystery, which is to say, the sacrament.