Music: Louis Armstrong, Because of you. Outside the sky is white in the background and clad in grey blue skeins, the city seems to hide and seek behind the squared pierced walls, quiet before the offer of the night, before every light goes on. My homely frustration grows as the world gets nearer my reach, and I wonder, is there any way out or in. I like the chimneys over that roof, I also think, which are in a cluster and all different and undoubtely a sign of the Life going on at the other end of the pipes.
Libi is patiently waiting for me to agree to watch that movie with her for her dissertation and I just can't come out with anymore excuses. In my pockets, my longing for when I lived in Venice is just getting out of hand, I think.

I didn't follow the movie really, but I looked at the faces and took the pictures, not only because I was just left there, while the many dogs were running in and out of the house, and my mother was industriously preparing their meals. It was also to capture another connected moment, so to speak.

The first night I ever checked in a US motel, it was upstate New York on the interstate through the Adirondacks. I had left NY with this rented car and was driving up there just to avoid freeways and traffic, as I would have always done for the following two months driving across the states.
I drove trought the night until I finally picked this motel because it was old-looking, and it was named as the NY hotel in the novel by Peter Handke I was reading then.

All the doors of the motel were green except a red one, and the old man gave me the red one, which was sort of scary and kind of cool, say. There were the so called Adirondack decorations on the walls and a lot of other crap inside, and this very old TV set, with no remote control but the rotating button to switch channels.
As I turned it on, Streetcar named desire, the first TV I was happening to see in a long time, and it really hypnotized and fascinated me. First time in the States ever, old Motel with old creepy man, in the middle of the forests with lake, Marlon Brando. It was enough. I didn't have a camera with me, just a notebook. I wrote "young Brando on Tv says, don't worry about it, everybody is alone as you are. He also says you should work out a little".

So as Brando and Magnani's faces appeared on my mother's TV, in that different ramblin' of mine two years later, different TV channel and TV set, different director, and language too, I just sunk in the coincidence, for meaningless as it was. Plus Brando was a little softer now and I felt better.
I said to my mother there was Brando. She stepped out of the kitchen and said, again? The guy's on TV all the time.

We were the lovers laying in bed in the room enlightened by the late Milano February dawn light, with the dog at the foot of the bed snoring and Sunday in the outside unfolding after the streetwashing small vehicles had droned with their orange flashing lights, us listening to blackbirds from the private garden on the other side of Via Savona alerting each others with short melodies, pigeons cooing somewhere from the roof right over the window door and almost no car chugging, leaving only distant vibrations in the phony promise of the dawn moments.

Along with the sighs of the dog by the throaty voice she rolled over and briefly puffed, moving her naked body against mine. I looked outside, where the sky was turning blue against the dirty dark and the silence of the greyish surfaces in the room in the house which was not ours, same silence which flooded the streets, disappeared before cars that ran madly again, because some stop light gave approval.
Silence came also back, identical (is that possible?), announced four floors underneath by the squeaking and banging of the exitway metal gates produced by someone stepping out in the city. It is a small step for a man, but.

In the faint bang she opened her eyes a sec, glancing at me and smiling and opening her mouth, I opened mine a little but no sound came out. I raised my eyebrows, so as to say, what, it feels like we are fishes, but she closed her eyes again. It was the dog to open hers then, and to look at us expectantly, but our bodies remained still under the red quilt in the sloughing shade of the room.

Even later there was silence, as we sat at the red table in the kitchen waiting for the coffee to come out. Could be we had no things to say, or too much heavy things to say, so I just sat there toying with her naked legs under my fingertips. Her skin darker than mine, her smiling sighs at my large weak pinches.

I think she talked then, said, how do you feel, but who knows what the hell I answered. Cell phone messages were already storming in by the returned on devices. We sat there more minutes sweetly smiling trying to reassure each other without words and mostly looking down, impelled forward by the invisible of our lives.
Her look said how in a different way it had happened before to us, so it might happen again. Me and my friend's girlfriend.

When you stumble into blogs, by accident, and you read something so hilarious it turns out it's totally sad.

-- excerpt #1:

"Guys who want me to send nude pictures, chat erotically, and don't offer to pay. This disrespects my dignity as a person (do you think I have nothing better to do than get some random stranger off?!)" http://genuinejessie.blogspot.com/
Alas, the preceding sentence is not ironic.

-- excerpt #2:

"This is not a hate site. The thesis of this blog... is to document the constant whining and hand wringing of the Far Left in its various forms, and how they demonize anyone who is either 1.) straight, 2.) white, 3.) conservative, or 4.) all of the above."

http://antiracistlosers.blogspot.com/
This Adorable Little Rodent was born "in response to the Blog Racist Losers". We therefore link the latter.

-- excerpt #3:

"Then, the couple who clean for me came. They don't speak a word of English. So I taught them a few words of English while they taught me many many words of Cantonese. They told me that their place in China is more than twice the size of my place, and they are in the States primarily to take care of their two grandsons. They are not the best cleaning professionals, as they could not read the labels of the cleaning supplies. And sadly for them, in America, there is a special cleaning supply for everything. Yet, I value their work ethic. I always believe that no one should be on welfare - just look at these two, finding jobs to support themselves in spite of the language barriers. I then went to the library, returned tons of books and borrowed even more. It is such a luxury to have time to read. "
http://www.jnntt.com/
She probably borrowed some Mao Zedong poems.

Since also Italy hates us, I thought it was just right to cheer us up as the folks there at America hates us! do. You know, doing the neighbourhood thing again (we did something already, like walk milan, but it's all dust to dust now). As you read, you may also load part of the map of my neighbourhood. It comes with the shaped-as-an-exclamation-mark swimming pool.

"In the light of a lowering sky the city is immediate and sculptured. None of summer's white palls, its failures of distance and perspective." (Don DeLillo, The Names)

I have been living in this district for about three months now, and I can't complain, it's full of stores, shops, restaurants. A movie teather. An outdoor public swimming pool. On spring pubs' sidewalk tables are crowded with charming half-naked women. Not so bourgeois like the average Milano district.
It is about 6 PM as I hit the road. The most active hours in terms of ground-level activities just began. People should be coming back from work, shopping, meeting into bars etc.
But no way. The neighborhood is deserted. It's still a middle-class city after all and they're all on vacation --

All the stores are closed, nobody's around. Not even the cars lined along the empty sidewalks --

The modern old tram awaits all scooped out, in background is visible a local example of delirious abusiveness --

The movie theater "Colosseo" is closed. In this cinema I saw "Casablanca" for the first time, years ago. It was a rainy day. Me and the girl by the sexiest mouth came out and just wanted to smoke one. It was not raining anymore and we were proud of the movie.

"Five Days of Milan" Square is empty too and shut down. Please note the local homer simpson wandering near the news-stand --

Fashion stores may seem open, because of the shop-window and all. But they too are closed. The passerby: a tram driver idling.

Who's open then? You'll discover it in the next neighborhood photoblog roundup. Photos are ready, taken during the same walk, but we just don't feel like throwing all the pictures down in the same post, all right?