THE FLORENCE ISSUE
OOTS
VOL 1 | ISSUE 1 | SEPTEMBER 2017
23 DAY TRIPS
Dov’è: (doh-VEH) “where is it?”
D OV ’ È
Everything from nearby towns to weekend getaways.
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15 15 ESSENTIALS TO PACK Familiarize yourself with the social fashion norms to blend in with the locals.
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CAPPUCO, PER FAVORE Learn what, when, and how to order your caffeine fix.
T H E TR A N SPL AN T Originally from Baltimore, this graphic designer left in search of inspiration, but found herself.
04 T HE R AVIN G AR C HIT E CT Brunelleschi, a known mad man, selected to build the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, promises the high heavens.
N OR T H E R N I NF L UE N C E A history of competition and friendship betweeen Florence and Venice.
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20 H IDDEN J EMS Fuck the expected spots, go to these secret spots for the true Florence experience.
DON ’T B E TH AT G U Y A Medici Prince begs for the savior of Florence, a city plauged with an overload of tourists who destroy the city.
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“...a s hor t , ho m e l y ,
gold s m i t h n a m e d F il ip p o. . . ”
By Miranda Oliver In 1418 the town fathers of Florence f inally addressed a monumental problem they’d been ignoring for decades: the enormous hole in the roof of their cathedral. Season after season, the winter rains and summer sun had streamed in over Santa Maria del Fiore’s high altar —or where the high altar should have been. Their predecessors had begun the church in 1296 to showcase the status of Florence as one of Europe’s economic and cultural capitals, grown rich on high f inance and the wool and silk trades. It was later decided that the structure’s crowning glory would be the largest cupola on Earth, ensuring the church would be “more useful and beautiful, more powerful and honorable” than any other ever built, as the grandees of Florence decreed. Still, many decades later, no one seemed to have a viable idea of how to build a dome nearly 150 feet across, especially as it would have to start 180 feet above the ground, atop the existing walls. Other questions plagued the cathedral overseers. Their building plans eschewed the f lying buttresses and pointed arches of the traditional Gothic style ROOTS | PG 6
then favored by rival northern cities like Milan, Florence’s archenemy. Yet these were the only architectural solutions known to work in such a vast structure. Could a dome weighing tens of thousands of tons stay up without them? Was there enough timber in Tuscany for the scaf folding and templates that would be needed to shape the dome’s masonry? And could a dome be built at all on the octagonal f loor plan dictated by the existing walls—eight pieshaped wedges—without collapsing inward as the masonry arced toward the apex? No one knew. So in 1418 the worried Florentine fathers announced a contest for the ideal dome design, with a handsome prize of 200 gold f lorins—and a shot at eternal fame for the winner. Leading architects of the age f locked to Florence and presented their ideas. From start to f inish, the project was so charged with doubts, fears, creative secrecy, and civic pride that a lush tapestry of legend was woven around it, turning the story of the cupola into a parable of Florentine ingenuity and a central creation myth of the Italian Renaissance.
When the f irst histories were written, the losers came of f particularly poorly. One contending architect, it was said, proposed to support the dome with an enormous pillar rising in the center of the church. Another suggested building it out of “sponge-stone” ( perhaps spugna, a porous volcanic rock) to minimize its weight. Yet another, according to early legend, proposed that a mountain of dirt mixed with coins serve as scaf folding, to be cleared away free of charge by the money-grubbing citizenry after the dome was complete. What we know for sure is that another candidate, a short, homely, and hot-tempered goldsmith named Filippo Brunelleschi, promised to build not one but two domes, one nested inside the other, without elaborate and expensive scaf folding. Yet he refused to explain how he’d achieve this, fearing that a competitor would steal his ideas. Brunelleschi’s stubbornness led to a shouting match with the overseers, who twice had him restrained and forcibly ejected from the assembly, denouncing him as “a buf foon and a babbler.” Nonetheless, Brunelleschi’s mysterious design piqued their imagination perhaps because
they already knew this buf foon and babbler to be a genius. As a boy, during his goldsmith’s apprenticeship, he had mastered drawing and painting, wood carving, sculpture in silver and bronze, stone setting, niello, and enamel work. Later he studied optics and tinkered endlessly with wheels, gears, weights, and motion, building a number of ingenious clocks, including what may have been one of the f irst alarm clocks in history. Applying his theoretical and mechanical knowledge to observation of the natural world, he singlehandedly worked out the rules of linear perspective. He’d just spent several years in Rome measuring and sketching the ancient monuments and noting, in cipher, their architectural secrets. Indeed, Brunelleschi’s life seemed to have been one long apprenticeship for building the dome of unequaled beauty, usefulness, honor, and power that Florence yearned for. The next year the overseers met with Brunelleschi several times, eliciting more details of his scheme. They began to realize just how brilliant (and risky) it really was. His dome would consist of two concentric shells, an inner one visible
“ . . . a m o un t ain o f dirt m ixe d wit h co in s serv e as
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“ His d ome w o u l d c onsis t of t w o shells...”
from within the cathedral nested inside a wider, taller external dome. To counteract “hoop stress,” the outward, bulging pressure created by a large structure’s weight that could cause it to crack or collapse, he would bind the walls with tension rings of stone, iron, and wood, like hoops on a barrel. He’d build the f irst 46 feet in stone, he said, after which he would continue with lighter materials, either spugna or brick. He also assured the overseers that he could do without conventional, ground-based scaf folding. They welcomed the enormous savings in lumber and labor that would result, at least during work on the f irst 57 feet, after which everything would depend on how things went, “because in building, only practical experience will teach that which is to be followed.” In 1420 the overseers agreed to make Filippo Brunelleschi the provveditore, or superintendent, of the cupola project. They added one signif icant caveat. Being hardheaded merchants and bankers who believed in competition as a way of ensuring quality control, they appointed Lorenzo Ghiberti, Brunelleschi’s fellow goldsmith, as a cosuperintendent. The two men had been rivals since 1401, when they had vied for another illustrious commission, the new bronze doors for the Florentine Baptistery. Ghiberti had won. ( Much later, an admiring Michelangelo would refer to a second set of Ghiberti’s doors as “the Gates of Paradise.”) By this time, Ghiberti was the most illustrious and politically connected artist in Florence. Now Brunelleschi, whose design for the cupola had been accepted outright, was forced to work side by side with his gallingly successful rival. The arrangement would lead to much plotting and skulduggery. ROOTS | PG 8
On this tempestuous note began the building of Il Cupolone (the Big Dome), a monumental project whose growth over the next 16 years became the city’s drama in miniature. The dome’s progress was a reference point for life in the city events were predicted to occur and promises were to be kept “before the Dome is covered.” Its looming, rounded prof ile, so unlike the angular lines of the Gothic, symbolized the Florentine Republic’s freedom from tyrannous Milan, and even more so, the nascent Renaissance’s liberation from the airless constraints of the Middle Ages. The f irst problem to be solved was purely technical: No known lifting mechanisms were capable of raising and maneuvering the enormously heav y materials he had to work with, including sandstone beams, so far of f the ground. Here Brunelleschi the clockmaker and tinkerer outdid himself. He invented a three-speed hoist with an intricate system of gears, pulleys, screws, and driveshafts, powered by a single yoke of oxen turning a wooden tiller. It used a special rope 600 feet long and weighing over a thousand pounds—custom-made by shipwrights in Pisa— and featured a groundbreaking clutch system that could reverse direction without having to turn the oxen around. Later Brunelleschi made other innovative lifting machines, including the castello, a 65-foot-tall crane with a series of counterweights and hand screws to move loads laterally once they’d been raised to the right height. Brunelleschi’s lifts were so far ahead of their time that they weren’t rivaled until the industrial revolution, though they did fascinate generations of artists and inventors, including a certain Leonardo from the nearby Tuscan town of Vinci, whose sketchbooks tell us how they were made. Having assembled the necessary tool kit, Brunelleschi turned his full attention to the dome itself, which he shaped with a series of stunning technical innovations. His double-shell design yielded a structure that was far lighter and loftier than a solid dome of such size would have been. He wove regular courses of herringbone brickwork, little known before his time, into the texture of the cupola, giving the entire structure additional solidity. Throughout the years of construction Brunelleschi spent more and more time on the work
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site. He oversaw the production of bricks of various dimensions and attended to the supply of choice stone and marble from the quarries. He led an army of masons and stonecutters, carpenters, blacksmiths, lead beaters, barrelmakers, water carriers, and other craftsmen. When they were puzzled by some tricky construction detail, one biographer tells us, he’d shape a model out of wax or clay or carve up a turnip to illustrate what he wanted. Brunelleschi took particular care of his workers, both for their safety and to ensure that the dome progressed as rapidly as possible. He ordered that their wine be cut with water to keep them sharp on the heights (this provision was revoked under pressure by dissatisf ied workers) and added parapets to the suspended platforms to prevent them from falling or looking down from the dizzying height of the dome. According to popular legend, Brunelleschi could also be a hard taskmaster. When masons went on strike demanding better pay, we are told, he called in scabs from Lombardy, and relented only when the masons returned, hats in hand, and agreed to resume their jobs—at reduced wages. He also had to contend with highly placed adversaries, led by the scheming Lorenzo Ghiberti. Brunelleschi was the project’s conceptual design and operational leader from the beginning, yet he
and Ghiberti received the same yearly wage of 36 f lorins. Brunelleschi’s biographers tell an amusing tale about how he f inally outmaneuvered Ghiberti. In the summer of 1423, just before a wooden tension ring was to be laid around the dome, Brunelleschi suddenly took to his bed, complaining of severe pains in his side. When the baf f led carpenters and masons asked how they were to position the enormous chestnut beams that made up the ring, he essentially delegated the task to his rival. Ghiberti had installed only some of the beams when Brunelleschi, miraculously on the mend, returned to the work site and pronounced Ghiberti’s work so incompetent that it would have to be torn out and replaced. Brunelleschi directed these repairs himself, complaining all the while to the overseers that his co-superintendent was earning a salary he didn’t deserve. Though this account may be tinged by hero worship, archival records at year’s end do name Brunelleschi the sole “inventor and director of the cupola,” and later his salary rose to a hundred f lorins a year, while Ghiberti continued at 36 f lorins.Ghiberti didn’t give in. Around 1426 his assistant, the architect Giovanni da Prato, sent the overseers a large piece of vellum, still preserved in the National Archives of Florence, on which he’d penned a detailed criticism of Brunelleschi’s
“...pl a n s w e re
t o failure. . . ”
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work, complete with illustrations. He claimed that Brunelleschi, through “ignorance and presumption,” had deviated from the original plans for the cupola, which was now “spoiled and put in danger of ruin.” Giovanni also composed a violent personal attack on Brunelleschi in sonnet form. The poem calls Brunelleschi a “dark, deep wellspring of ignorance” and a “miserable and imbecile beast” whose plans were doomed to failure. If they ever succeeded, Giovanni rather rashly promised, he would kill himself. Brunelleschi replied with a barbed sonnet of his own, warning Giovanni to destroy his poems, “lest they sound ridiculous when all the dancing starts, in celebration of that which he now thinks impossible, the famed cupola.” Brunelleschi and his workmen eventually did their victory dance, though only after several more years of doubt and struggle. In 1429 cracks appeared in the east end of the cathedral nave beside the dome, forcing Brunelleschi to shore up the walls with iron tie bars. In 1434, perhaps at Ghiberti’s instigation, Brunelleschi was jailed on a technicality regarding unpaid union dues. But soon after, he was released, and the cupola continued skyward at the average rate of about one foot per month. On March 25, 1436, the Feast of the Annunciation, Pope Eugenius IV and an assembly of cardinals and bishops consecrated the f inished cathedral, to the tolling of bells and cheering of proud Florentines. A decade later another illustrious group laid the cornerstone of the lantern, the marble structure that Brunelleschi designed to crown his masterpiece.
his complex synthesis of inspiration and analysis, his bold reworking of the classical past to the needs and aspirations of the present. Once complete, Santa Maria del Fiore was decorated by artists like Donatello, Paolo Uccello, and Luca Della Robbia, making it both the birthplace and the proving ground of the Renaissance. Brunelleschi’s dome still rises from the terra-cotta sea of Florence’s roof tiles, itself terra-cotta clad yet harmoniously proportioned, like a Greek goddess in homespun. It is mountainous yet strangely buoyant, as if the white marble ridges rising to its apex are ropes holding a zeppelin to Earth. Somehow Brunelleschi captured freedom in stone, exalting the Florentine skyline ever after with an upward-yearning embodiment of the marvelous human spirit.
Soon after, on April 15, 1446, Brunelleschi died, apparently from a sudden illness. At his funeral he lay dressed in white linen on a bier ringed by candles, staring sightlessly into the dome he had built brick by brick, as the candle smoke and the notes of the funeral dirge spiraled into the void. He was buried in the crypt of the cathedral; a memorial plaque nearby celebrated his “divine intellect.” These were high honors. Before Brunelleschi’s time, very few people, among them a saint, were allowed burial in the crypt, and architects were mostly considered humble craftsmen. With genius, leadership, and grit, Filippo Brunelleschi raised true artists to the rank of sublime creators, worthy of eternal praise in the company of the saints, an image that would dominate the Renaissance. In fact, he paved the way for the cultural and social revolutions of the Renaissance itself, through
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DON’T BE THAT GUY ROOTS | PG 27
P
By Alex Kreinces
rince Ottaviano de’Medici di Toscana, President of the International Medici Association and present-day representative of the Historic House of the Medici—the family who powered the Italian Renaissance and thus much of Western civilization—lives in the splendid, art-infused city his ancestors helped create: Florence, Italy.
He is not a happy man.
Over the last decade or so he has watched Florence drown beneath a tsunami of mass tourism. Some 16 million tourists a year now visit the city, population about 350,000. That’s 45 tourists per resident. Some tourists use the city streets as toilets and sleep in public squares. Vandals have defaced the historic buildings. The prince cites “wild nights” of hard-drinking tourists and the “invasion of American fast-food joints.” So the prince and his allies have started a new initiative: Save Florence (in Italian; in English soon). One ally, tour operator Mark Gordon Smith, is trying to raise money for TV documentary shorts about the city’s treasures and declining condition. He enlisted the prince’s help with these videos about the new campaign. My last visit to Florence was of f-season more than a decade ago, so I was surprised—appalled, really—to hear their descriptions and see the photographs of the current situation.
Loved-to-Death Syndrome Strikes Again
Tourists clog the major avenues. They stay on average for just two nights; many for only a few hours. International franchises have moved in to sell international stuf f to them, forcing out local shopkeepers, products, and artisans. “These shops have taken the place of hundreds of Florentine
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traditional activities,” says the prince, “and have changed the cultural signif icance of Florence.” Well, I thought, Florence is inland, so at least it’s safe from cruise-ship crowds. Wrong. Cruise lines supply about 1.5 million of those tourists, via hourlong bus rides from Livorno and La Spezia. These visitors arrive in large guided groups. Most stay in the city for three hours or less—so brief ly that they contribute little to the economy per capita, but they take up plenty of space. Florentines, on the other hand, have been moving out—100,000 of them, f leeing traf f ic jams, jackedup real estate prices, and, if Prince Ottaviano is right, loss of what they hold dear. By one estimate, around 40% of the city’s artists, sculptors, musicians, writers and composers have left since the mid-1990s for more sustained cities in Europe.
Poor Maintenance
On top of all that, says the prince, “There is an absolute lack of laws to protect the city from uncontrolled mass tourism and insuf f icient maintenance of buildings, monuments, urban spaces, and works of art.” He feels there’s no political will to improve stewardship of the city. “The situation became even worse to my eyes when I discovered that the police don’t have any agent— not even one!—who can certify the state of decay of building façades and require the property owners to make the necessary repairs.” He has asked UNESCO to propose placing Florence, a World Heritage city, on the “endangered” list, since these changes “have very much diminished the city’s ‘outstanding universal value’”—the overriding criterion for World Heritage inscription and ef fectively putting repairs in motion. So what would “Save Florence” do?
“ .. . d row n be n e at h a tsu n am i o f m a s s t o u ris m . . .”
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“ W hat he w an ts, tho u g h, are t r ue trave l e r s, n o t hit-a nd-r u n to u r is t s . . . ”
Call for a New Direction
To be clear, Prince Ottaviano doesn’t want to get rid of all the visitors. What he wants, though, are true travelers, not hit-and-run tourists who come only to check the Uf f izi of f their bucket lists and take a self ie in front of the Duomo. Instead of mass tourism, he wants Florence to focus on attracting people who seek to experience the soul of the place—its boutique hotels, its traditions of food and artisanry, its lesser known museums, and of course its people. That kind of tourism would be better economically as well, spreading benef its among city residents. North Carolina-based Mark Gordon Smith has a deep self-interest in all this; his tour operationspecializes in Florence and caters to just that type of visitor.
He’s now running a campaign on Indiegogo to fund some TV videos that will highlight the treasures hiding in Florence’s 16 charming, artlaced gonfaloni— the neighborhoods that most visitors miss—as well as threats to the character of the city. Prince Ottaviano is helping. I’ll pledge a hundred bucks myself; I don’t know when or even if I’ll visit Florence again, but I sure want to know that the City of Flowers lives on. Meanwhile, the prince is moving to convene the type of geotourism stewardship council f irst proposed a few years ago by National Geographic’s former Center for Sustainable Destinations (now the independent Destination Stewardship Center). The goal would be a combined ef fort to take better care of the city and to inform and attract benef icial visitors, travelers like ROOTS readers. Perhaps Save Florence can even catch the attention of those bedazzled city politicians who f lock to mass tourism like moths around a street light. Regardless, we who love Florence must do our best to save it. We can only hope that the leaders, Disraeli-like, will follow.
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By Jessica Victoria Lauro
In the world of travel, the word “transplant” is described as someone who uproots the life they’ve been creating and moves to an entirely new location. It is new in the sense of culture, familiarity and often times, language. This issue,we are highlighting an inspiring transplant, emerging photographer, Anne Thompson.
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RTS: Anne, thank you for joining us, let’s start of f
with a little about you. Enlighten us.
AT: Thank you for having me! Well I was born and
raised in Baltimore, MD. I went to undergrad at American University, Go Eagles! After which I lived in L A for a while doing some design work and now, I am f inishing my MFA in photography this coming May from Studio Art Centers International. RTS: Fantastic, congratulations on your graduation.
So tell us, what brought you to Florence?
AT: Well, when I was an undergrad, I studied at
SACI and I just fell in love with my professors and the structure of the school and the passion that radiates through the walls here. When I left I told Romeo (DiLoreto, professor and mentor) that I would be back to do my Masters here. I absolutely fell in love with the city itself too. There was something about it that always called me back and I couldn’t say no anymore. It was important to me that I did my masters where I rediscovered love for photography and love for myself.
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RTS : A ll uprooters and expats know how hard it is to
start over in a new place, what about this move was dif f icult for you and how have you worked through it. AT: When I came back, I expected to feel the same
as I did when I was here for undergrad but it was harder because a lot of the people who made this place special for me the f irst time around, aren’t here now. In terms of how I work through it, I have a tendency to build a family unit wherever I go. Like right now, my family consists of Romeo, Angela and Francesca my baristas, Lucca my produce guy, Cody Carolina Grace and Hank (all friends from SACI ), and of course my dog Olive. I also taken up writing again, it helps me process everything. RTS : What are you working on at the moment? AT: Cutting back on my caf feine intake. Haha,
in all honesty, I’ve fallen in love with this family concept and I’m working on a multimedia series that explores that concept. Each piece has three components to it, the f irst is a portrait of that person that I’ve taken, the second is a piece that
I’ve written about them and the third is a looped recording of their favorite sound. The series is broken up by location and features my family in each place I have considered home. It’s coming along in a pretty interesting fashion because this has taken at least f ive years to get all the pieces I’ve wanted and because its taken this long, it’s also a depiction of my growth as not only a photographer but an artist. RTS: So would you consider yourself more of an
installation artist?
AT: I don’t know that I would necessarily call it
“I’v e fallen in lo v e wit h t his fam ily co nce pt . . . ”
“installation” but maybe a gallery artist? Whenever I take on a new project or explore a new idea, I think about how I want it to look. I basically curate all my own shows. I used to hate the idea of someone other than me curating my work but I’ve collaborated with a bunch of curators but its tough. I really only trust Nicole DeSantis to curate my work. She was with me at SACI during undergrad and she’s not only done amazing work but being that we are close friends, she’s knows me and where my work comes from so I trust her to understand why some ROOTS | PG 35
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“ I re d isco v ere d my lo v e for ph o to g rap hy and my lo v e f o r myself. . . ”
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things are nonnegotiable. She also tells me when I’m being a raving artist and need to calm down. She’s one of few people in the world who can yell at me and I agree that she’s right, I’m very stubborn with my work, which is not always a good thing. RTS: So going with this gallery artist image of
yourself that you’ve created, where did that begin? AT: It really started with my f inal project here at
SACI when I was an undergrad. I stopped thinking of my photographs as f lat images but as living stories. I honed in on this idea of creating an atmosphere. My f inal project was me photographing in the cof fee shop that I go to everyday, (don’t ask me which one it is, I won’t tell you) and I wanted to connect the photos in a ring and suspend it from the celing so that the images are at eye level. And you step inside the ring and you turn in a circle to see the images and you hear the recordings of the cof fee shop playing in the background. An individual spotlight would also light each image and the rest of the room would be dark. RTS: What is the best piece of advice that you give
people who have just made a move like yours? AT: Find a cof fee shop you love and go there
everyday. It will start the creation of routine in your day. I can’t function without caf feine so the f irst thing I do everyday is grab an espresso or a doppio, (double shot) depending on the amount slash quality of sleep I got. I usually also get a nutella cornetto but lets not talk about my love handles right now. After a few weeks of going to my place, angela and Francesca started to recognize me and would know exactly what I would get and would make it as soon as I walked in the door, they also could tell when I was having a bad day and would smile at me and even just that little bit made a big dif ference. They were the start of my Florentine family. RTS: What would you say to people who are hesitant
to make the move?
AT: Why are you waiting? This experience literally
changes your life, it teaches you to live simply and how happy you can be with so little. It expands you in ways you can’t even imagine. When I came back from studying abroad in Florence, I was only gone for four months. But I have always said that I learned more about my work, my life and myself in those four months than I had in my entire life combined up to that point. Now imagine what could happen if you expanded that time exponentially,
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imagine what greatness could occur. The only thing that standing between where you are now and where you want to be is you, so get a fucking move on. RTS: So now I have to ask the dreaded question;
what comes next for you?
AT: Hahahah tis not a dreaded question. I’m not
entire sure yet, I don’t know how long I want to say in Florence for, or if I even want to stay in Italy at all. As of right now, I’m set to work at the A linari Collection, I’ll be able to show some of my work there which will be fantastic. But after that I’m not sure. I’m thinking Berlin but going back to the states for a bit would probably be a good idea. I’m focusing on getting my work in as many galleries as possible right now, getting my name out there. I have a good feeling about all of it, and hey everything happens for a reason right? RTS: Any last thoughts? AT: Be yourself, to the ends of the Earth. Stick to
who you are. Still grow and expand as a human but your values are everything. World exploration will force you outside of yourself and you will feel exposed so it will be easy to wander from yourself. But at the end of the day you are who you are for a reason. There was a quote that a friend once told me on the cusp of a new chapter of our lives. He said something along the lines of, “be who you are, everyone else is already taken, all you can do is be yourself.” I’m pretty sure he took it from somwhere and that it was much more put together than that just was but, regardless, the senitment is what it’s about. Be you, unapologetically.
“...a n d h e y e ve r y t hin g ha pp e n s fo r a re a s o n r ig ht ? ”
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