Among his grand exploits, having cheated the government (25 billion liras of settlement in 2000); having blathered endlessly about charity while making a fortune; having sought the coziness of commonplaces...
But these are not great sins and we are not to judge sins anyways. Much worse would be having contributed to the impoverishing of music by reducing its ambiguity to a steadfast restated pronunciation of self-evident elements. Melody, pathos, lyrics, energy, in other words making the kitsch out of it. It was thank to him that in the last thirty years people forever learned that the word 'tenor' was to be associated with big men singing moving things on stage, solitary as monads and without real interaction with a opera (only "moments"), in a cloud of exteriority and lies under which the remains of music stays as nauseating as a jingle heard too many times. Pop music, in other words. Without the rebel element.
The Pavarotti kitsch will follow us for a long time, like a trail left behind his steps. It is everywhere in the newspapers now. Politicians before everyone else, because LP was a political tool obviously (politics masked by charity), and then the classic shower of hyperboles by celebrities' mouths. All the hype to hide everything that is human like misery or smallness.
Anyway. I don't think I will remember Luciano Pavarotti after this week and I doubt I will ever think about him evermore. Yet it matters to me to recognize in him one of the many, say, riders of the falling country who with great weight of trivialization helped the fall in these times.

In the basement of the famous music club, breathing hot air under the low ceiling as I walk amidst the little crowd gathering, I feel ill, disturbed by my weakness, dizzy of pharmacy drugs and nasal congestion. The self-sabotage keeps moving forward like the only thing moving forward inside me.
I wonder if the bacteria of my cold, or the viruses of my flu are spreading themselves around the room as I move around.
There are many young italians here, guys probably living in the city. I look at them, listen to the italian chit-chat all around me. I don't feel any bond, any special sympathy for them. I wish there was no italian language at all down here tonight. I don't want to pay attention to it. I look at them, all happy and relaxed, so casually conscious of their appearance. I'm not one of them. Neither I am one of the locals of course. No doubt about that.

Me and Loris* hug awkwardly in a corner near the bar. He's nervous and excited for the show about to begin. We talk about the tour, the positive reviews that made him happy. We drink something, I have a beer because I don't know what to order, I tell him I admire his courage to be a small fish in the biggest sea here, when he's such a cult in Italy now. He says, I am tired, I can't wait to be back in Italy.
When the show starts, the music is definitely too loud for me, the voice almost unintelligible, also because of the chewed sort of italian-british accent Loris pulls out when he sings. The choreography they use during the songs, partially coordinated and partially improvised on the very limited same-level stage is pretty amazing, and even hating the loud volume as I do the sound is evidently great.
Loris has a couple of winning numbers, like when he plays the guitar stroking the strings against the tripod of the mic. An american girl near where I am standing, shouts to a friend: "I don't understand a word! [unintelligible] He's awesome!"
I am leaning on a column at the back of the room where the loud music drums less violently against my sensitive ears. They will be buzzing for hours at the end of the night.
I wonder if all these silly precautions and fears are a definitive sign of my being irremediably old. But the truth is, I always was like this. I always had sensitive ears, always felt alone and about to fall when I was sick, always had a sense of not belonging to the place where everyone else felt at ease.

Someone is dancing in front, I see the bobbing heads and arms backlit against the sweating faces of the band, in full light and with eyes mostly closed. There are many wild cheers at the end of the songs. I applaud, listening to the distinct smack of my hands and feel alone and displaced. I would love to be able to talk to the asian girl sitting next to me, or to some of the guys there that seem so nice and cool. But the music is too loud anyway, and I wouldn't know what to say. I actually had more fun at the gay bar the night before, at the reunion with the anthology guys. And not only because in the meantime my cold developed into something nasty and feverish. Here everything seems to be dragging me in a place where I can't be, where I am no good. Here I don't learn nor I see because I am only worried to defend myself, somehow.

Hours before, in the afternoon -- a long conversation with Libi. Finally with a prepaid telephone card that didn't let us down. She was having a late dinner with friends, and I was bowing inside a telephone booth on 14th street. She said, it seems like three years you've been away. They will feel like twenty before you come back. Don't be such a Penelope, I said. Although I actually wish I was a Ulysses.
I told her I was thinking of going to Loris's show anyway, even if the cold was getting worse. I told her that I needed to make things happen.
We talked, putting a lot of warmness in our voices. Things seemed patched up between us now, although I kept feeling a sort of pressure from her regarding the direction I had to take, the things I was considering to do. My not saying, I love you I miss you, I'll be back soon.
We discussed the practical things, the package of winter clothes I wanted to send back home, the destinations, the accomodations. Nothing useful coming out of it, except the illusion of working out the loneliness.
I told her how naively admired I was, of the guys of the anthology, how I was amazed by the humanity and beauty and diversity of their characters, of their souls. How the city was contradictory in that regard, so that at moments you felt surrounded by so many authentic interesting people and stories, and at moments solitude and deceit where everywhere, with every step, into every shop and with every trading act, muttered words of courtesy, cash exchanging hands, friday night competitions to get cabs, racism and hypocrisy of all the parts. I was wondering how amazing it should have been to fall in love with someone in a city where you can feel so lonesome and left out, and cheated. And because of that, how probably rare and misunderstood falling in love must have been. Not differently from other cities, of course, the cities we knew already. But so obvious in the feeling of the place, when you're a stranger into it.

At the end of the concert, moments of blessed silence. Me and Loris exchange a slap and then I climb up the stairs and get out of the club, while the band hurriedly packs up the instruments. There's a long line of people on the sidewalk outside and after few minutes breathing fresh air, checking for new messages, I realize there is no way I can get back in the club now. The line extends itself down the stairs and it is impossible to cut in front.
I wait outside for half an hour. An hour. I start feeling very cold and tired. What a crappy night. No dinner or hanging out with the band, for me. I am going back. I go back. So nothing happened in the end. Slowly walking through Soho and the village back to the hostel I stupidly keep calling home as I talk by myself.
I know I won't be leaving for any place the next day. I lack the courage to embark on a bus and leave the city. Humiliated by my weakness, I feel too sick and about to fall.

_{* As you know, not a real name. Never real names.}

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.

(you may want to read the introduction first)

It was more than twelve years ago. I was a former high school student without much ideas about his future and, as every summer, I had felt obliged to find me a job, just so my dad would not glance at me despisingly.
It was summer 1993 I think. I had found this job as a replacement cleaning person at the Malpensa's airport, far out northwest in the countryside.
It took two hours of commuting everyday to get there, and since the first day I had managed to find someone to share a car with, to make the trip at a reasonable cost of money and time.

Those were two colleagues, brothers, or maybe brothers in law. We used to meet nearby the jails of Libi Vittore in the early afternoon in Milan. I arrived with my old moped and they were already there, sitting in the black car parked in front of their house. The engine would start as I opened the door to get in.
"Ciao."
"Ciao."
That was all. They would sit in the front seats. I would be sitting in the back of this WV Golf Turbosomething, looking out of the window, first the city streets dispersing, then the fields and woods and villages running by fast along the freeway, in the smoky prairie.

During the journey out, the prairie was all grey, and greenish in spots, romantic when marked by old abandoned farms and lousy for the rest, of that bright glazing brown the new houses have in the middle of new roads and emptied fields, and the matured corns too.
During the getting back home trip instead, everything was black, indigo far in the distance, except the guardrail glinting orange and red fuzzy sliding madly aside the car.

They listened to the radio for the whole trip, constantly. Without even appearing to be listening, the volume set just a little slice under the maximum. The whole trip was flooded back and forth into music, and nobody was supposed to talk or anything. It would not have been virile to talk.

So there I was, in the back seat, bombed by a pair of 80 watts loudspeakers hidden behind the backseat. Those trips were a torture. That summer I learned one of my most peculiar limits, the fact that, to me, loud music was not only unbearable to the ears. It made me nauseous. It made me want to puke. To die.
To make matter worse, they listened only to italian music. I mean, to the cheapest italian music possible.

Sometimes, in desperation and always too much impressionable by my own feelings, I would ask them to lower the volume "just a little, please".
The driver, who was the bigger man of the two, a married dumb-ass taciturn large fellow, would turn to his companion pouring out a little laugh at his benefit, or an inaudible joke maybe. Then he would adjust the volume a little, pretending at first to lower it and then raising it instead. So next time I would have learned to think before asking such a wussie thing, like lowering the sound of "Radio Italia" down.

The hit of that summer was "Non c'è, non c'è" ('There is not, there is not') by Laura Pausini.
You know, they write a song, they make money out of it, and they never realize that their work can be used, and is used, as an instrument of torture. Like a barnacle, or the spaniard boot, or the thumbscrew.

I learned almost immediately all the words of the song, and after a few days of going back and forth with the two brothers I started to sing along with it. First in my head and then, in the effort to better my execution and inaudible in the stream of noise, I sung it loudly.
It was the only possible way my brain had, to do a little work during that trip. I had to take it.

As always happens, I ended up liking the song. I ended up singing it at home, by myself, or to astonished friends. I was convinced it was adorable of me, to hear me sing such a cheap song given the poses of intellectual I used to have (OK, OK, I still have them, what do you want).

Oh, the song was really cheap. The strophes were so trite you were at first surprised she actually had the guts to sing them. One went,

Tu non rispondi più al telefono
E appendi al filo ogni speranza mia

which means, "You don't answer to the phone anymore / and you hang all my hopes to the wire."
So she's still calling him, but he's not even bothering to answer. The song is all about this. A wonderful guy, who she adores, and who, alas, ran away. And a desperate girl who sings it.

Incantenata a una notte di follia
Anche in prigione me ne andrai per te

"Chained to a crazy night / I'd even go to jail for you". This may sound interesting, although quite unexplained in the context. But believe me, she uses the worse way possible to express it in italian.
Then the chorus would come, and with it the lines where she celebrated his good looks.

Non c'è , non c'`e il profumo della tua pelle
Non c'è il respiro di te sul viso
Non c'è la tua bocca di fragola
Non c'è il dolce miele dei tuoi capelli

"There is not , there is not the scent of your skin / there is not your respire on the face / there is not your strawberry mouth / there is not the sweet honey of your hair".

Those were the parts I liked.

The WV Golf would run across that hyperactive land passing all the other cars, and I would sit into it, still and desperate, imagining me as the subject of this song.
It was my mouth to taste like a strawberry, my hair to be sweet as honey, my breath to be craved by a woman's face. In my trapped imagination I figured myself as the object of desire of this deluded woman. Because, and the most important thing was this (as only now I realize it), I was gone. In the song, I had ran away without turning back.
Me, my strawberry mouth and sexy breath were just gone.

Strappando i sogni nei giorni miei
Te ne sei andato di fretta, perché

"Tearing apart the dreams in my days / you went in a hurry, why".

I was not at all that cleaning person prisoner of two dumb brothers in the vulgarity of music and besotted by its loudness.
I had took away, with all my good looks, by that ugly land.
After all, if only for that feeling of mine back then, Pausini earned her Grammy.

Laura Pausini won a Grammy. You probably heard about that already. She ran for the "latino" category and won. I'm happy for her.
Laura Pausini is listed for me under the group of italian melodic singers whose songs are all alike, whose singing style is all similar and, for the much energy it conveys into voice strength, whose interpretation regularly fails the impression. I'd put Eros Ramazzotti in the same category... and a whole lot of other singers of the bunch, always heard on TV or at the radio and always hated.
They sing, without really expressing or even considering what they sing. Their main problem, I think, is the quality of the lyrics. They're so poorly written, so dishonest, rhetoric, banal that you really can't put intensity and sincerity into that unless you're Frank Sinatra.
Lacking honesty, they use a lot of their voice. But it's not the same as being sincere, unfortunately, even though it may seem so to the naive listener.

Anyway, I have memories marked by certain Pausini's songs. Nothing is easier to have, without even being aware of it, than those kind of song-driven memories. Writer Pasolini used to say that. It is understandable, given the fact that all the radios use to push this kind of songs like hell, artificially making them 'hits' regardless their actual quality.
Is it still so today? I can't say. I've grown nearly ignorant in this matter by the days of my Pausini's songs memories.

So, I am about to share one of this Laura Pausini's song memories with you, and this is going to happen in the next part, which I have already written but it came out so long I had to cut it out from this post.

continue to second part

Rarely you get two interesting hints in a single interview with a musical artist on the italian press. Mostly is all the usual bullshit about the new album coming out, assorted gossip, what's the meaning of a song and other silliness.
This time, reading-yawning a recent interview with Paolo Conte (alas, from La Repubblica) in occasion of the new coming out live CD and DVD of this great songwriter and interpreter, I managed to be awakened by two passages, not bad considering the many poignant things he would say, if ever interviewed by a non-lobotomized journalist.

...Days ago I was reading a writing by Campigli [see artcyclopedia], who is one of my favorite painters. He used to write wonderful confessions as an artist: I know myself, he said, I know my paintings only through my mistakes. And so I am, in pain listening to my musics, I know where are mistakes even though they're not apparent to the others. And I suffer. But mistakes, if well managed, make the Style. (...)

You are so mindful with words: aren't you suffering these times when the word seems to have lost its integrity?

I don't give a damn, I am not suffering for the downfall of our literary gusto. As I always say, if you have to speak about being poetical, it has to be conceded not only to the literary field, but also to music. Music must be poetic, interpretation must be poetic, the relationship established with the public must be poetic. What is disturbing with writing, a part of the scarce plasticity of the italian language, is that many times, writing in oneself language, one picks the words that give absolute certainty: and this certainty sometimes is annoying, because the artistic dream is very abstract.
Sure, sometimes the cake turns out good, you really used the words that couldn't be changed with others. But in other cases the words control you: the artistic discourse is made of doubts, influences. Read more (in italian)

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music: none. leaning over the din of the awakenings, the crawlings of the cars, creakings of the balcony doors, the plane rumble approaching Linate airport, trite thunder not visible through the uniform white sky, the dense humid transparent gas floating up from here to the top over the pale lapsed human bodies.