Italy is falling  and I’m riding it upside down
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July 29th 2007 You think you can leave the matter to your lips >

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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.


January 1st 2006 I dreamed: visions of some new year >

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(In picture: thoughts of the whaled-head man, detail, draft)

The year when it snowed in June, when World Poulation reached eight billions, when Italian Government had to ration Energy, when the Man got to the Moon again, the year when it rained all year long, and the Perpetual Greyness of the sky spreaded to leaves, to passerbys' faces, to cars chromes. The year when Antarctica extended itself up to New Zeland, the magnetic poles were inverted, the Amazons turned into a bizarre pattern of deserts and woods, Venice melted in the mud of the laguna. The year when Record Labels ceased to print CDs, Publishing Houses to print books, movie theaters to exist, restaurants to stay open in the nighttime, trams to be public, swimming pools to be public, cars to be used to go to work, clothes to be dyed, hair to grow luxuriantly (barely surviving on the heads). The year you came back from camping tanned and smiling, you had two white plastic containers with you collected from some place on some beach, and you proudly showed them to me, saying: "dad, but, are they ancient?"

(continue to part two)

tags past

the milanese lamp post
If someone thinks you're great, it's not really you they think is great. And if they do a hatchet job on you, it's not really you. So the best thing to do is to protect yourself. Put on a moustache and sunglasses and stripes in your tie. Shave your head, change your name - and then keep the rest of you off the side
-- Tom Waits



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  • The endgame will culminate in the creation of an Eretz Israel by which time the Palestinian entity will be the substance of myth, nurtured only in poetry and song, some tears and some faded old maps. There are not even many Mahmoud Darwish' around to write about this pain. The fountains of sadness are sprouting blood, the insane cries for help are falling on deaf ears, at this time poetry and Literature seem superfluous, including my naive post. / taken from THOUGHTS OF XANADU: What the Zionists want

  • According to researchers at Oxford University, playing the popular, classic puzzle game Tetris after a traumatic experience could significantly reduce emotional scars. / taken from Health: Tetris Wipes Out Bad Memories, Say Scientists

  • Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury – you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Mr Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention." / taken from Johann Hari: You are being lied to about pirates - Johann Hari, Commentators - The Independent

  • The summer after Hearst's trial, Star Wars was released and immediately became a pop sensation. America now preferred its captives to be self-willed self-rescuers. Rambo would soon grace movie screens; Ronald Reagan would soon be president. And Patty Hearst would go to jail, a harbinger of our new age of "personal responsibility." What was a captive supposed to do? The jury decided: she was supposed to just say no. / taken from That Girl: The Captivity and Restoration of Patty Hearst (Page 2)

  • Most people, I would imagine, would simply drive on. She did not; she stopped the bus, followed me half a block up the street, and demanded to know why I’d been taking pictures of her, and insisted that I erase them. She was firm; I was surprised and incoherent. But after a moment of confusion, I managed to show her that I had not, as it happened, managed to catch her on film, showing her most of my pictures in the process. At first she was hostile, an avenging angel, but she relaxed as we went through my digital roll, huddling over the tiny light of my view-finder on a dark empty street. / taken from zunguzungu

  • In the seventh grade I moved the family typewriter into my bedroom to begin work on my screenplay. It was a very moving romantic comedy intended to feature a monkey, Simon LeBon of Duran Duran and the well-known actress Bess Armstrong whom I’d seen in my favorite movie of the 6th grade, High Road to China. / taken from 2007 Things «

  • An idea has only to be something you have not thought of before to take over the mind, and all afternoon I kept hearing in my mind snatches of books which might exist in three or four hundred years. / taken from Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai, from THE CHAGALL POSITION: Relations of Notes

  • dam's broke, / head's a / waterfall. / taken from 3quarksdaily

  • Still, the clothes are fantastic. / taken from sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy: A trial

  • W.'s always admired my whining, 'like a sad chimp, at the limits of its intelligence', but my depression took me beyond that, didn't it? You were silent for once, W. says. I didn't ring him, or respond to emails ... No chatter from me: that's when he knew things were really bad, says W. / taken from Spurious

  • Furthermore, as anybody who recently has endured the indignity of a traffic stop can attest, police in most jurisdictions routinely inquire as to whether there are weapons in the car. (In my most recent traffic stop, the officer asked, “Are there any weapons in your car I need to know about?” “No, none that you need to know about,” was my immediate response.) / taken from Pro Libertate: "Question 46," Revisited

  • What a pathetic group! What a lack of humanity and true pain! They were real and therefore unbelievable. No one could ever use them for the scene of a novel or a descriptive backdrop. They went by like rubbish in a river, in the river of life, and to see them go by made me sick to my stomach and profoundly sleepy. / taken from Dispatches from Zembla: "Those who suffer, suffer alone"

  • He’s thin and tall and you can see that his hands have been working for a long time. He’s chopping the thick mean ice in front of the church. “That’s tough work today,” I say. He stops and looks up, leaning on the long stick of the icebreaker. “Yes it is. But lookin’ at you,” he says, “I got me some new energy.” / taken from on the corner « Municipal Archive

  • Heard the alarm clock screaming with pain, / Couldn't find myself so I went back to sleep again / So fill my ears with silver / Stick my legs in plaster / Tell me lies about Vietnam. // taken from the swiss lounge: adrian mitchell

  • The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important." / taken from Shklovsky, "Art as Technique" via MUSINGS ON HANDKE’S PROSE


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