Dr. Peter Weller
speaker
668 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Dr. Peter Weller’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
You know, it's all these horror stories or whatever. And Venice has got an evil thing to it, like New Orleans.
And they know it, but they accept it, man.
Something about the canals. No, but they accept it. Look, look, look. They know it, and New Orleans accepts it. They go, yeah, that's part of our jam.
Yeah. You know, we got voodoo here. We got the other gods here, too, man. And so when Brian and I landed, we landed about 45 minutes apart. It was like 5 o'clock. It was getting dark. And it's toasty, you know, and he's coming up from Sicily and I'm coming up from Quebec and we get in a taxi boat and we're looking at those lights flickering through the magenta sunset.
You know, because it's the air from the cool air hits the sea. It's like this gauze. And that turns that sun into, like I said, an orange. It turns it into like this magenta gold. It's bizarre. And all the great paintings are painted in winter in Venice because of that sun. Yeah. Because of that filter of the dispensing air, right?
And we're looking at that and the light's flickering, you know, in the bell towers. And I never forget Brian with his... Brooklyn Irish thuggery turned to me and says, Peter, I think this is going to be really good. And, man, it was 10 days of heaven.
We walked Venice soup to nuts, man. We discovered Venice. We got up at 7 every day, walked it one way, walked the other, walked it one way, walked the other for 10 days. And you know something? I turned to him at the end of it. We're going up to Paris for New Year's. I said, Brian, I'm spending every Christmas here, man.
This is the most freeing, inviting, historical, weird, and inspiring place ever. And we went to Padua to see what Vittorio did. And those days you could smoke a cigar and walk over to the cappuccino. What are we going to see here? And Brian, you know, he's a photographer. And I'm a movie guy. And we walk in the front door. Nowadays it's hermetically sealed. It's been restored.
You've got 15 minutes. That's it. But this is something that da Vinci talks about. These are frescoes that Michelangelo sources. This is like... You know, it's true that everybody has sourced them. Vittorio Storo is correct. There's not a painter of the Western world that hasn't gone to there.
And this critic that came out about five years ago said, Giotto in the Cappella Scrovegni is the one event of Western art that you can't impugn. You cannot even criticize it. You can't even go there with, well, you know, as far as texture. Or one of these hoity-toity pretentious pieces of bullshit that people gauge art now. Because that is a jump off place. That's Neil Armstrong going to the moon.
You're going to criticize that? You're going to, well, you know, if I was Neil Armstrong, you know what I would have said. But that's what art critics do and art enthusiasts. That's not for me. And I know what I like. But to quote Gerns Gombrich, you don't know what you like. You like what you know. First of all, you've got to admit naivete.
And second of all, you've got to have somebody take you by the hand and walk you through.
And, you know, if you don't have somebody walking you through history for weirdos, it's always going to be weird.
But the thing is, if somebody walks you through and goes, look, see this here before? They're trying. See this fresco here from ancient Rome? Yeah. They had it down. It's lost. They're trying here in the Middle Ages. They can't do it. Okay, how come this guy can't?
Okay, maybe because he's studying with this amazing mosaic guy, Pietro Cavallini, that we can see in Rome, who invents depth with pieces of glass. Depth with pieces of glass is his Cavallini. Maybe it's because he's studying with him. It sure as hell isn't because he's like, you know, studying with anybody.
Something comes off the chip and all of a sudden you walk into the Capella Scriveni and you go... holy cow, and Brian and I went, we gotta call Vittorio Storero and thank this guy, and then I've thanked everybody since then, man.
I've thanked everybody, you know, cinematographers, I mean, Brian was working with, and I had just worked with Carlo De Palma, who was Antonioni's guy, and then he was with Woody Allen, and we'd just done Mighty Aphrodite, and Carlo De Palma, and other guys as well, man. I mean, you guys never went there? I mean, you can't look at the Sistine Chapel without going there.
So enough being made fun of. That's your anniversary.
That's your anniversary.
You got to go. By the way, you got to book it in advance.
Showing 81–100 of 668 · page 5 of 34
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