“I edit my posts for a while after they’re posted”

– Jago Noja

Ok. Let’s try to picture it in a single phrase. Hold your breath.

Aired from one of the TV channels owned by the Prime minister, a TV show — hosted by a woman former Head of Parliament nominated during a past charge by the same Prime Minister — has been fined by the Guarantor Authority of Information because it significantly violated the pre-electoral propaganda rules by ‘lacking in objectivity, equity, loyalty, impartiality and plurality of points of views’, obviously pending completely on the Prime Minister’s side. Here. Puff. I almost made it.

Too bad in the same phrase, already quite unbelievable as it is, I should have added that the Prime Minister (always the same one) snapped furiosly after the epsiode, attacking the Autority for the Information that fined the mentioned Show on his own TV. He suggested that the Guarantor Authority for Information must be politically driven by communists to attack him and his TVs. This was clearly before he rushed away to extinguish the fire in his pants.

Oh, the criminal idiocy you face in this country is just overwhelming. Too bad it is also boring. Like a comic film is boring when nothing serious happens between the gags.

— In picture: before the once wooded area of Bosco di Gioia, a menacing sign alerts the citizens. Future is at work.

So the cut down of Bosco di Gioia (“Gioia woods”, an old green area in the center of Milan), initiated four days ago in the midst and with the dread complicity of Xmas holidays, ended today, with the final removal of all the remains of the dead trees (180 trees razed).

The area of “Bosco di Gioia” is soon to be transformed into a big skyscraper turd, like we were still in the fanatic raze-and-build frenzy of the eighties or something, thanks to the lazy greed meanness of the villains in charge.
The fancy turd will be occupied by the offices of the Lombardy Region Administration, may this name be wiped out from the maps forever. Big names of politicians wanted it, against citizens’ will, with a big help from urban planners, architects, fashion designers, engineers, techicians, administrators, bankers, industrialists: may their death come soon, with humiliation and atrocious pains, may their names be cursed forever or something less rethoric but equally disrupting.

“Bosco di Gioia” is not anymore. And its name, is now a real mockery. “Gioia”, in fact, comes from the historical figure of Melchiorre Gioia, who was one of the many ignored italian patriots who fought for italian unity in the XIX century: toponymy in Italy is quite a boring thing, as it is in most of the places everywhere. In the old times names of streets and squares in Italy had a lot more of imagination and pertinence and made a lot more sense… but that’s another story.

Anyway, by sheer coincidence, “Gioia”, means also “Joy”. And we all know how Joy comes always with its other half, Sorrow (“dolore”). It was the writer Ceronetti to ironically note that the subway station underneath the area was called “Gioia”, but no “Dolore” station followed or preceded as it should have.

Well, my simple idea is to change this name once and for good. Joy does not belong to this criminal doomed greedy lazy city anyway, if it ever did.
Sorrow does. Not everyday, of course, not anytime: only when the indifference to everything but money, boredom, fears and power has the hiccups, and all the sad wasted land of this built city emerges with its naked, hungry, menacing, hopeless face.

Let’s change the damn unlucky name, then. Let’s address a public petition. After “Gioia”, always comes “Dolore”.

(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)

It was this early summer a night in Rome, very late. I was walking up Via Trastevere towards the bridge under one of the two large lines of trees that run aside the avenue.

Groups of nighthawks students and tourists were still wandering here and there, from one place to the other or just standing and sitting down at the curbs waiting for the late night trams.
The sky was blue indigo down to the black outline of the roofs and leaves where from the orange dirty glow of the streetlights poured down to solid.

The flowers stand was always open and a foreign guy stood in there, feet up on a small table looking at a television set, his face plunged into the flickering blue gleam.

Farther on the street was darker under thicker trees. At one of the old crossroads, rolling shutters closed all along the buildings, a dog emerged from the black void of the shaded night.

It was a stray black nervous fast female dog, who overpassed me without even slowing down her frantic pace.
But there was something funny about her walk. She walked with all her legs oddly spread, stuck out and protruding, bended outward. And as she passed I reckoned the reason, because she was still wearing her metal collar with the long metal leash chained to it.

She obviously dragged the metal leash right in the middle of her own path, having her paws to step over it.
It was probably years already she was running around the city with that leash chained to her, so that explained the odd deformity developed in her walk.

I looked at her disappearing in the black night as she appeared, too much shocked I was by the vision to have the promptness of trying to stop her and free her from her dragged chain.

Since that night, that dog came back visiting my thoughts though, sometimes my dreams.

The chain, the deformity, the misleading nervous freedom, the nowhere, the odd sound of clinging metal against the sidewalk, the black over the black night and the senseless hole of my slow reaction, that small urban tragedy just a tiny scratch on the surface of the most cynical city in the world.

All summoned up to something more definite which I haven’t defined yet. I won’t go that far to say it was metaphoric of a more general condition in which we all live and stuff like that, even though I thought about it.

Only thing I know, it is to this day the most sorrowful, sad thing I ever happened to see — in my entire life. TV bullshit excluded.

I met Libi at Patti’s place in Milan this spring. I was late for dinner and made the stairs in a hurry and rang the bell out of breath. By chance it was Libi to come to the door and I still remember the look in her eyes up to me as the door opened, and how we shook hands.

‘So you’re Libi I’ve heard of you’.
‘Yeah, me too’.

She had a short roundish body, lively smile, sweet manners, dark beautiful eastern eyes.
We talked a lot, even if I was supposed to court another girl that night, a blind date Patti had set up for me.
But the other girl was too shy and I couldn’t talk with her at all, although I tried since she was much more sexier and exotic than everyone else in the room.

The day after me and Libi went out to eat and started going out together, and a week later I left for Rome as I was supposed to do and we didn’t see each other for months.
In Rome I lived at some girl’s place but it didn’t worked at all. Rome was hot and enticing but everything went wrong with the girl.

It was on the first night Libi was supposed to sleep in her new home I came back to Milan. I was angry, and depressed for that return which was somehow another defeat of mine, as Rotterdam had been. I was full of hatred for Milan and the people there.
I pulled over in front of the anonymous condo, wherein was half set-up an apartment where nobody had slept in yet.

Libi was waiting for me against the glassy front door, I stepped out of the car and said ‘how I hate this city, you know that’ but she just hugged me tight. All around, the city gurgled and rumbled as an animal preparing to go to sleep.

the girl: good evening!
the old man: what, good evening? It isn’t afternoon yet.
girl: I know, it’s for the dark hall–
old man: you’re not that right, right?
girl: why, I just–
old man: You should have your prostate checked.
girl: I don’t have a prostate.
old man: I can lend you mine.

— my condo’s entrance hall, Milan

He sat at one of the tables outdoor impatiently imagining the small bundle of warm flaky pastry and almond paste, the kipfler, that he was going to eat in a little while altogether with a cappuccino with foam sprinkled with cocoa. He opened the newspapers, browsed them, looked at some of the titles but the kipfler on the background of Saint Marco square deserted, the salt of the air in the blue sky with small pink clouds overcame all the titles of the newspapers.
“Politics, politicians…” he thought with a finicky thought as if looking at another animal species by the unworthy disgraceful appearance. “Politicians… what do they know of the kipfler?

What philosophers can possibily understand… just two colourful cloths drying in a alley shook by the wind give an idea of the inadequacy, the impotence to clinch, of their doctrines.

In picture: At the presentation of his last movie, in Rome, a compliant, depressed mr. Woody Allen is made fun at by a sad “comic” impersonator of mr. Berlusconi. Which is notoriously another proven way Berlusconi uses to be everywhere (read about this episode on Dagospia).
Because Woody Allen is so much worshipped in Italy, they have to smear their showbiz-political-pasquinade crap all around his icon, regardless he’s still alive, and, not like them, sensible. Oh, what a shame… I’d like to say sorry in name of my country to mr. Allen if I could. Sorry so much. That’s the shape we’re in, man.
And, I love your shirt by the way.

My neighbour mr. C. is a fifty years old ex-transvestite ex-workman and a pleasant storyteller, who knows all sort of tales about celebrities and underdogs of the old Milan’s so called ‘transgressive’ life.

I bump into him in front of our condo, which is a classic six floors milanese apartment building with two stairs, a glass front door, a foreign underpaid maintenance man and a lot of fights among the residents.

I am entering the building as C. is coming out. He wears a kufia and a black leather jacket, worn out blue jeans. A small cap on his few hair. His lips are a little too inflated and give him a faint constant smile. But maybe it’s just his disposition. His eyes are incredibly vivid and always ironic. A typical milanese. He’s soundly fighting to close the glass door which is broken. He says: “with all these hookers up here they ended up breaking the door finally!”

Dang! I knew it… Since when I came to live here, six months ago, I happened to notice certain always-closed shutters on the other side of the small courtyard. Only now and then one or the other of the shutters could be spot opened, with a man (always a different one) standing there at the window for a cigarette. Once I glimpsed some weird furniture all in gold in the inside… a couple of girls lounging around it…

I have intuition for certain things. Just give me few details and I’ll be our Sherlock.

I used to point at the shutters and say to friends: prostitution is going on in there! but inevitably they were convinced I was making some sort of joke, responding with some other boring joke. Mostly they censor reality or are uninterested by it, so you have to stick to commonplaces when it comes to the outside world. Because of that I don’t hang around with them too often, it’s too laborious for me. Doesn’t matter. Now thanks to mr. C. outspoken off-steaming the truth was finally out.

“Hookers!” I say, “really!”
“Oh sure!” He points at two other lines of always-closed shutters facing the street I never noticed before, “…these apartments are all occupied by girls and transvestites prostituting. They’re all foreigners, the girls say they have husbands or fiancees but it’s not true, it’s just fake marriages for the permit of stay… You have no idea the stories this condo endured in years!”
C. lived here for thirty years.
I laugh, “this makes this condo very much more interesting now.”
“Yes but listen,”, he replies, “my balls are broken already (italian say: I’ve had enough). Two years ago they raped a girl on the third floor. Last year a woman collapsed in front of the building and nobody helped her and she died. Last month another case of rape at the expenses of a poor albanian prostitute at the upper floor, with the complicity of other two of these junkie bitches (true: it was on the news). It’s all drugs, boozing, bad faces coming and going here. And mr. Baulio, who owns almost any apartment in the building, rents those small rooms to the girls for an absurd €600 a month. They prostitute all night and day long, he makes loads of money, men of all sort always hang outside here and the building is screwed. I’m sick of it.”

I sympathize with his indignation and encourage him to write the letters he wants to write to the condo manager. But we both know it’s useless. The manager works for mister Baulio and mister Baulio is a big mafioso, who bought all those apartments for nothing after they burned down years ago. Nothing in the condo happens if he doesn’t want to.

The rich gets richer these days, says mr. C. ,”the middle class doesn’t exist anymore”. He’s a landlord after all, He must be surprised to learn that his word should but is not that powerful.

It happens so, that suddenly one of the rats in the cage is so much bigger than all the others that law cannot even touch him, and all the other rats are too divided to do anything, and the big one can only get bigger.

C. runs away, we say goodbye cheerfully, and I finally enter the building. I think of all the bad stories he just told, and I know I’ll have to say to Libi she must pay attention.

But, you know, I am happier.
That’s because my ruling passion is to uncover things that complicity of the folks hide away from me.
It’s always been that way.

And, kind of nothing right now makes me look at the future with more confidence and cheerfulness than knowing I live in a phony middle-class building which is in fact a giant brothel in the middle of a phony middle-class city which is in fact a huge ratcage in the middle of a phony conformist catholic nation which is in fact an immense headstrong den for habitual sinners.

— In picture, above: today’s sunset as seen from the condo in object

She’s not italian, she comes from outer space
we look in the eyes across tables and faces
we don’t smile each other if just for a second
given time to tap a glance or a beckon
She wears her black hair short, she has a smooth skin,
her meaty lips dance is as deadly as a sin
that thick dark frame of her wise glasses says
she’s insecure and she likes it the rough way
Outside the place of the vortex goodbyes
I stand and reach for her faint blue smile
beyond the window pane she bows her head
into neon light she’s slicing white bread
I follow her hand moving as a toppling wing
I look away and that’s what I wanted to sing.