You think you can leave the matter to your lips
and they don't work right

-- Emanuel Carnevali

This morning it seemed so important to write down the dream, but at night its importance dissolved and plays now remote like some music fading out (in my head is Leo Reisman). So many hours later it is almost as not interesting as someone else's dream. So it happens with dreams, rapidly marvel is substituted by vague unfamiliarity and the effort to rebuild hazy details ruins it all.
Once again I toy with the idea of writing more about my so called roots or about some old classmate or relative I don't see anymore -- because I can't stare directly at my life right now, and honest I tried to put down few posts about it but my interest on the matter so soon dries out, and what I thought was fun to write about suddenly does not even faze me anymore. With memories of the past sometimes it is like with the dream I made this morning as seen from tonight, all smudged out like a faint stain.
I visualize a two lines image of my father, where if my father gets in touch too much with the world, you know, socializing or looking out for the others, they shot him with a tranquillizer an take him to the zoo. Like one of those bears they find roaming around in Bavaria.
I think I took too much from him but my heart is much bigger, and luckily less neat.
I don't really care when Nina tells me that she still loves that man (no, not my father, I changed subject don't you see). Yet driving in the night to vague destinations, possibly Vigevano, I feel disturbed and intrigued by hearing once again the story. Unchanged after so many years. Disturbed, I don't know why. Maybe because someone else's unfulfilled loves remind me my own, and everybodies'.
ANd I care when Libi tells me she loves me so, but we can't help each other just as well. I will think these things better later in the night, not usefully.
Not during the days, which are beautiful, warm and dry, good in the shades. The Nights, windows open on the courtyards, voices from the televisions and the dinners and the dinners in front of the televisions. The stunning full moon not right above my head. I called about the job at the University in Sardegna but it was too late already two weeks ago. Later talking on the phone with Bruma I convened, I had hoped to be helped to find a direction but it's on by myself now. I also asked in vain, I mean with the wrong code words, what was the grown-up choice to make, but nobody seems to get that I seriously don't know.
I dreamed it was me, a young Allen Ginsberg and Giampiero Epidermico. Giampiero Epidermico is not his real name. He was a junior high classmate of mine who since then has become a Very Young Internationally Renowned Contemporary Art Critic. A cousin of mine, the one who can see in the dark, is a Contemporary Art Critic too, senior editor of a Important Magazine abroad, and at one moment of their lives, years ago, the two of them were running errands together in a famous Art Magazine in Italy. And they hated each other very much. Which surprised me when I found out. But then I saw Epidermico and I realized. He was constantly in a good mood and that was about it.
I was living in Venice back then and they came for the Biennale on different trains and visited differed pavilions but for me and my Russian friend the Biennale was good only for a good laugh and a good depression, the present only existed as a distortion of the much greater and very humid past we were living into.
I was stupidly radical about it back then. I'm not saying I was understanding. Once I said to my cousin that I thought Contemporary Art should not be called Art, you know, not to confuse it with the real thing which although it is dying, destroyed by restorations and abysmal ignorance, it is still somewhat alive, and we can at least pretend we know why it was supposed to be so great. Not that in fifteen exams of Arts I took at the university I ever met anyone capable of telling me why and how a Bellini is so great compared to a minor. No, it was all crappy theory there, all methodology (but then I learned, outside of school, and now I could tell the difference why and where.) But my cousin looked at me as if I was completely out of the world. He was probably right to look at me like that. It's not Art I said is satire! we should call it Visual Satire or something I said. He kept looking at me like that. What he said? He said Art is what it is happening now.
In my dream Allen Ginsberg and Giampiero Epidermico they went on putting green toothpaste in their pants to melt their dicks onto their balls sort of JT style and I was by myself in the dream until Allen Ginsberg came to me and told me I was cool because or even if I wasn't putting the toothpaste on my balls. The post ends here.

Entirely by chance, only because sometimes I browse for fun search sites to find blogs dealing in english with Italy and Italian topics, I bumped into this. It is a regular touristic blog report, like many. The person who wrote it seem to be a nice, curious traveler, not necessarily conventional. To economize on lunch she makes sandwiches out of hotel breakfasts, just as I do. So the present post, which is going to scrutinize certain wrong impressions Rome left on her, is not *against* her, at all.

Nonetheless, I am fascinated by the totally misleading impressions people get from my country. It's the undying misunderstanding that Italy is a country where even the ugly has a romantic beautiful reason to be although it makes everyone's life miserable.

As a disclaimer, I put beforehand that obviously my impressions of foreign countries are probably equally fascinating in their being totally wrong. So, there's nothing personal here. For me it's just an occasion to further bash my country, that's all. I love it when travelers are innocent and when they innocently notice everything that is different, convinced to make discoveries out of the oldest crap, hopefully feeling there must be something behind they don't grasp.
We should create a website and call it something like editedcommonplaces.com. There we could share and correct our wrong impressions as travelers.

1.alimentary impressions:

"...when I saw the sign saying 'Spizzico' I didn't just dismiss it as crappy fast food... I got a quarter of a margerita pizza - and I mean like a quarter of a very very large pizza... Possibly the most exciting fast food discovery of my life - and I pride myself on being a fast food authority"

Spizzico. The insulting birth and spreading of the Spizzico chain dates back to more than 10 years ago. I remember it. Our amazement in seeing pizzas sold in a fast-food set. Depressing. What must be known of spizzico's pizzas and alike is that they are considered toxic on a sanitary level after just ~30 minutes they have been served. That's because they are congealed pieces of half-cooked pasta that pass from below zero to 350 centigrades oven temperature in a jiffy. So not only they are served fast, but they must be consumed fast. Also, they may give the wrong impression of being tasty but their ingredients are an enigma. What kind of cheese decorates them? Certainly not mozzarella. Thus, they are not pizzas and should be avoided without afterthoughts. Even if you're a fast-food authority.

2.vehicle impressions:

"Their love of scooters, for every one motorbike there must have been 50 vespas... Their love of tiny tiny cars,"

Scooters and tiny cars are not used in Rome because people love them. Scooters are incredibly popular because Rome is not only a gigantic garage, the most crowded garage of Italy, but it is also one of the most congested, disorganized and risky garages in the world. Therefore moving from point A to point B is not fun at all and can go on from minutes to hours out of schedule. To park a vehicle is not fun but the most frustrating and suicidal task ever conceived by human beings. Scooters are not repositories of love, but means of subsistence. They can grant up to two hours more of life each day to their bearers. They are a sign of the end of times and the end of civilization and as that they must be looked at, with horror and respect.

3. archaeological impressions:

"Their inability to destroy any old historical stuff."

Right. I am not even going into this. Post ends here. Busy sobbing.

We argued for the second time about that Billy Wilder's movie "One, Two, Three". I flatly stated that the movie was sheer propaganda of the cold war. Russian are represented with the usual demeaning stereotype of the illiterate, greedy, corrupt thug. Or as naive idealists easy to buy. Nothing very distant from the representation of Russian people in any other western Hollywoodian movie of the last sixty years at that.
"Let's imagine they're not russians, but jews, or black africans," I argued. "Wouldn't you be ashamed and disturbed by it?"
"No. It's a comedy," she defended, "and well done too."
"True. I am not saying you couldn't laugh with it. But There is a comedy which after all starts from the things as they are, even if it ends by overturning reality completely. And a comedy which just destroys reality from the start, without appeal, with commonplaces, burlesque, caricatures. That's even worse than a serious propaganda movie."
"I can appreciate any kind of movie for its artistic values regardless the politics or the propaganda involved in it."
"Me too, mostly", I said. "But at least let's take some points away from the valuation we make of it"
"But why?"
"Because it allowed politics into arts!" I said. "It tried to play tricks on us! That's not good art in my book!"
"Uff, I hate it when you talk politics!"

At the end of this conversation, which could easily apply to the movie 'Borat' too, I wondered a little about my relationship with politics.
I am very sensitive to politics. I am not saying I have a great understanding of it, but I know where it can be found, how it operates. I can recognize it even if it's very well hidden behind different means, pretenses and results.

So what basically happens with politics is that I start talking about it not because I enjoy to, or because I have my idea and I want to be in the arena. I start talking politics simply when I feel attacked by it. When I perceive propaganda hidden behind informations, arts, entertainments. When I perceive aggressive politics against my rights or others' rights. It's more a reflex than everything else, and in fact the results are not very brilliant, since I am the first one who gets bored of arguing about politics.

As with the movie "One, Two, Three", nothing bores me more than seeing a form of art I love prostituted by politics. But what really makes me snap, is to see folks persuaded by it as if the politics or the propaganda were completely absent.

That really puts me in a desperate mood. Because I think there's always a struggle between arts and politics or religion, and in that moment I see the arts losing the battle.
In fact, Ideas always want to enslave Arts, and Arts always have to find new means to disclose their intentions beyond Ideas. This is always a result obtained with Form, because Ideas are not the essence of Arts. The only essence is Form.

An example? Take any religious picture of a master of the renaissance. No matter what any Scholar of Arts will tell you, the most important thing into it are not the allegories, the subjects or the ideas it conveys. The most important thing instead are the colors, the light, the way surfaces juxtapose, the composition, the design, etc.

Another example? What Kundera said of George Orwell's novel 1984 (I paraphrase): 1984 is not a good piece of art, not a good novel, because politics dominate the novel and not the other way around. This is true even if you agree with Orwell's visions and ideas, because it's a formal problem.
The simple intention of seeing a political idea prevailing in a work of art makes the work of art tinkle, like a bad coin.

Just like the other one, this pope is stupid. He keeps coming out with stuff that has no sense, hollow words only full of the masonic meanings that few initiated can use to recognize each other.
When I lend him an ear, it's always like I'm hearing elaborated phrases about nothing: "hi corpodibacco, didn't you know it that today the purple hare flew to the castle of dung?". and I: "sure Ratzi, and the finned ship of pure rotten desire just sunk in the sea of radiators."
We can convince anyone that we know what we are talking about, since the hare and the radiators are a dogma.

One of the most gigantic idiocies we are forced to listen to over and over it's the one about the 'Christian roots' of Europe.

"Virgin Mary full of grace," asked the pope, "...be an ever vigilant keeper of Italy and Europe, so that from their ancient Christian roots the populace will be able to get nourishment to build their present and future." (from AGI)

It's the old polemic about the European Constitution not mentioning the Christian roots in its preamble. The pope speaks about the Virgin Mary full of grace when in fact he's speaking about politics, God knows if the Virgin will forgive him.
I'd rather have him going a bit into the details of the virginity of Mary, but that's what we deserve.

Now, I have nothing against the Christian European tradition. I spent most of my wasted life of student and teacher studying the Italian arts of the Renaissance and the middle ages. I can't think of anything more beautiful and living among the dead things of this country than an altarpiece painted by Tiziano or Bellini.
If it wasn't for the restorations (that's a too painful argument).

What would have been of that long moment of our history without the spiritual milieu that pervaded this land, which is the christian culture? If you go into the Basilica of Frari in Venice, and look and the mentioned Virgin Mary rising in the marvelous Tiziano's Assumption you must recognize immediately the power of spiritual faith, and the deep connection between the reasons and the energies of those pieces of art and the Christian culture.

That said, this pope is really stupid. There is no such thing as "Christian roots". And I am not even going into the pagan origins of our culture, from the Greek to the Romans to the dozens of other people and religions that made Europe what it is or what isn't anymore.

The point is that the History of a continent it is not shaped like a tree or a fungus: it has not the roots at the beginnings and the branches at the end. In fact, what are the beginnings? Where is the end of the branches?

It's the wrong metaphor.

The History of a continent it's like a slowed down gurgling tempest, or a noisy hurricane. It certainly comes down from some altitude and ends up smashing things at the bottom end, but that's about it with the similarities.
It is a sequence of countless contradictory events that only temporarily have the aspect of a path or a growth. And only because humans are small, busy or blind they cannot grasp its entirety, which is probably for good (we have limits)
Didn't the Romans had the same sensation? After all their tree was taller and their roots deeper.

Tomorrow we will have to hear the stupidity of muslim or jewish roots, or orthodox roots. They're all the same hollow wrong metaphors to me. Like it wasn't true that there isn't a single idea which hasn't be growing from another idea.
I'm not like Dawkins, I can afford to have a religion in my world. A religion is a poetic idea, sometimes even intense and alarming, or fruitful as the History of Arts can prove. I for once, am not at all sure about the origins of anything and I am open to the suggestions of spirituality.

But the religions of the popes and the churches it's not about spiritualism. It's about the privileged politics of determinism, and that's really depressing. And stupid.

(...) as you'd know Milano is under a white gray sky and the streets are Christmas lightened up and wet of peeing rains. The angry faces of the citizens know no repose. Clothes are forgotten hanging out of the windowsills. The radio says that an ATM conductor talking on the phone run over and killed in Via Procaccini a woman crossing the street. The woman was young. I wonder whom the conductor was speaking to? Instantly I think: a woman who was pestering him or whom was pestered by him.
It's all about the living, any thing visible on earth, except maybe certain portions of art. The world disgusts and never satiates. The speaker of Radio 3 rants about soundtracks and says 'indemuddforlovv' and must be turned off. I think about death but it doesn't help me to live more intensely because I can't believe it it's all here even though I repeat it every morning. Etcetera.

How's your life in the middle of this silence?
"Different every day. It's like being at the control tower of the airport: deadly dull at certain moments, terrifying at others. Sometimes the ship is filled with fishes, sometimes you look for your wedding ring at the bottom of the ocean, sometimes the wind blows so strong that it almost rips apart the skin of your face, sometimes you sip your lemonade at the edge of the swimming pool. Sometimes you party, some other times there's famine: in the middle nothing. Sometimes, as we Americans say, it rains dogs and cats, sometimes even bulls, cows and mice. And some other times my life floats on a petal of lily."

(Tom Waits, interview with La Repubblica. Reversed translation by italyisfalling.com)

Of the bastards, the brawlers and the bawlers, none is the perfect or more accomplished one: they all are bizarre creatures, ignorant of the world of which they grasp the sole part life has assigned to them. That's why all their voices are small as little stones, colored in the inside and smart enough to travel their way like bullet rounds scattered in the widest yard. Or something like that.

If you lived in Naples, you'd discover that here it is impossible to have something copied. The appointee, workman or craftsman, will always make for you a different object; he considers himself under the actual spell of his own geniality, mysterious and uncontrollable. If you go to the gallery, and give a look at the copyists, you'll realize that they all change at least one detail; everyone betters the masterpiece with some of his own. Luckily there are the women, who are more practical: In no other city of the world they are equally needed to keep life in balance.

(Guido Piovene, Viaggio in Italia, 1953. Translation by Italy is falling)

So much for the industrial world of reproduction.