5, 6, 7, 8!

Reading my copy of Monocle on my orange flight back from Berlin I felt a bit nostalgic of Tokyo. I’ve traveled to Tokyo a few times but only for business so far. It’s always very challenging (the time difference, the jet lag, the endless working hours in order to maximize value for flight) but I love it.

Even looking at language programs on the japanese TV late at night trying desperately to find sleep has its fascination. Or stepping out of the bed at 3 am and reaching the nearest Lawsons convenience store for carbs, diving in the velvety silence of the Hanzomon streets.

What I love about Tokyo is the furniture and the music stores. Excellent service means one can listen calmly to all sorts of CDs in pleasant stores, which do not look like supermarkets. Be it japanese groups or bossa nova…Brazil is big in Tokyo.

One of my favourite CDs actually comes from a furniture shop, editing its own music compilations, featuring groups such as The Juju Orchestra (with the beautiful Nao Posso Demorar or What is Hip?).

Japanese groups are the real discovery and it’s a pleasure to receive an enjouee’ complicity look by the record shop owner at Spiral Records when I ask if there’s anything new on the rack by Sly Mongoose or Cro Magnon …

pale shelter

Five days in Berlin. This time, I saw the pale face of Berlin. When I arrived on saturday Schoenefeld was covered by a fluffy coat of snow, reinforced during the night…white streets, frozen lakes, silent pace of the town during the weekend. Cold but glowing pearl white. Rabbits moving swiftly from the Volkspark to the gardens and viceversa…the blackbirds were precise decoupage silhouettes on the snow.

The baltic icy drizzle took over on monday, the snow turned into muddy slush and the whole town was swallowed by a dirty brand of grey. The city showed its melancholic and sad face. No bikes around. It seemed as if some giant hand had slowly reached for the nozzle and selected “soviet mood” on a boxy black and white TV set.

But it’s when it gets really gray and un-sexy that you really discover the assets of the city. The warmth of the Wohnzimmer on a sunday afternoon. Sitting nearby strangers at the counter at KaDeWe, enjoying an impromptu saturday dinner at 6.30 in the evening, geez it’s cold outside, no way we trek up to Prenzl’berg…The gemuetliche Kneipe, with good company sharing views about what Berlin means to each of us…Converging to “our local”, the best pasta joint in the Kiez, with our neighbour A. and talking about Berlin and its golden age of couture…

It’s pale, but it’s a shelter…

compare and contrast

This morning I compared 3 newspaper front pages. I leave you the comment.

a) Financial Times, european edition

“Germany ready to take steps to support eurozone” A photo of Peer Steinbrueck, very, very worried. Asked whether Germany would risk seeing the eurozone break up rather than take action he answered “Could you imagine anyone would be willing to put up with this? We would have to take action -There is an enormous amount of liquidity in the markets and we are seeing very large budget deficits”.

b) Les Echos, online edition.

This morning, a photo of streets on fire in the Guadeloupe. This evening “des Etats Generaux et 580 M Eur pour les DOM” and a new photo, Sarko sitting down with the DOM MPs, perusing papers and discussing measures with concern and concentration.

c) La Repubblica.

“L’addio di Veltroni: chiedo scusa” (Farewell by Veltroni: I’m sorry – if you want you can hum along “Hard to say I’m sorry” by Chicago)

“Riot in Lampedusa”, photo of the detention center in flames.

“Record audience for the Sanremo song contest – Patty Pravo’s nude look”.

After this, how do you give a meaning to the day?

I forked out 4 euro and bought the new italian version of WIRED. Because our neighbor Rita Levi Montalcini is on the cover. In the interview she says: “In every catastrophe there is the potential for an upside, still one must be able to spot it”.

photo: Albert Watson for Wired Italia

enjoy the silence

All I ever wanted
All I ever needed
Is here in my arms
Words are very unnecessary
They can only do harm

going cheap

why isn’t anyone telling these stories

Yesterday the Berlinale closed and I’m looking at it from Rome, throught the magnifying lens of Kino.

I am intrigued by the photography of Tom Tykwer’s The International…“if you control debt, you control the war”. But even more so by Storm, a film about the investigations on war crimes in former Yugoslavia.

I have seen so far only this trailer, so I cannot comment on the film. But since it deals with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the labyrinth of EU politics, I guess it is quite interesting. The director Hans-Christian Schmid says “why isn’t anyone telling these stories? because they’re too complex”.

For those interested in the lethal mix – bad banks and war in the Balkans -  “La linea dei mirtilli” by Paolo Rumiz is the suggested reading (unfortunately it’s not a novel).

here it is forbidden to talk

If my eyes belong to Rome, in today’s crystalline light, maybe my ears listen to Berlin, cuddled up in the green silence embracing the town. But I breath in Triest, where the wind carries the perfume of the sea, and where a mimetic Karst  squats between sea and wind, like a lynx cub, nostrils tense and alert.

This morning the light in Rome was precious. My mind voltiges swift to next sunday, when I will be in Berlin with my brother. But now I’ve read my first ever pages by Boris Pahor. So I am still. I am in Triest, my inner core. My madeleine and my cub imprinting.

And that language, which I could not speak nor understand, the hymns during the mass, is there as well.  A language never used but always present, with clear spots like a leopard skin, sharpening feline intuition in a child.

Slovenian is for me the perfume of pinze fresh from the oven. Of ripe sticky grapes of terran, vintaged in a hurry before the bora comes. It’s Karlo’s bachelor onion omelette, when Milka would visit her family and he would rather stay home. My only language with a perfume.

Boris Pahor – “Qui e’ proibito parlare” (Here it is forbidden to talk) – “Parnik trobi nji”

being from some-where

The siberian wind is bringing at last blue skies to Rome. Sharp edges emerge from razor-thin shadows on the facades of the buildings, you can tell pastels from ochras. The muddy hues of the long days of rain were eventually washed away by the wind.

A sort of circumspect bonne humeur has resurfaced for a moment in the city, even if the news didn’t improve. It’s one of those days in which your eyes take control and take in the day. You need to breath this light before thinking again. Two newspapers remain rolled up like flags.

Things to notice. The scaffolding around the obelisk on Spanish Steps has gone. Who knows since when. Months maybe. Along Viale Trinita’ dei Monti I see how all that rain has changed the landscape. Now the roofs of San Carlino al Corso and San Giacomo are a bright emerald green, the grass roots presumably eating into the frescoes of the baroque. Rome is getting irish looks. Moss is everywhere, like in Piranesi. The feeling of decadence morphs into architectural decay. But stop it, there is the sun, forget about it. The sun will at least dry the monuments.

The fountain basins below Pincio were dotted by coriandoli, carnival is close and it’s always cold at carnival – a physical feeling. I always wonder – Villa Medecis oblige – why in french they’re called confettis. And why in italian these specks of paper carry the name of an indian spice. Must be Venetian short-hand.

N. and I meet close to her hotel for a coffee and a promenade in the sun. In the gardens of Villa Medici she tells me how Washington is changing since January. The hope for starting a new chapter, the awareness of the difficulties, but also the almost physical presence of high energy around. Turning a page as heavy as a stone, but going for it.

In the cold garden atelier, we stare at Avedon’s photos of Theo perched on a director’s chair in her Dior dresses, long legs draped in an infinite fourreau, the shadow of her perfect salieres playing contrast with diamonds. And we read Avedon inquiring if maybe Miss Graham wouldn’t mind sharing a suite here in Rome with the other mannequin during the shooting, since it would be cheaper…

Warm renaissance colors of the Medici’s cafeteria. We both live in towns which we learnt to make our own. And these cities suffer to be put to the test more easily. This could be the fate of capitals, which alternatively polarize more our desire of staying or leaving, compared to the apparent stability of our home towns.

At the same time, belonging to several places is probably what defines the identity. When you go back to your hometown like the sea to a shore, you would never accept less than an ocean, you could not stand being encircled in a lake. Then in the oscillation between two worlds probably is your true home.

the pataccari of history

Have you ever been tempted by that fake handbag while strolling in Florence? Did you glance at that remarkably well reproduced Rolex in a Capri pizzeria at dessert time?

There’s much more on offer in Italy, but only for locals. Especially for young locals, or not so attentive baby-boomers. Why should they go through the long decision process and high cost of getting something genuinely authentic, when they can have a fake?

A fake history, for home consumption.

The people who lived WWI and WWII are completing their bow in the sky of life. They can tell the difference between the real stuff and the counterfeited. Some want to shed light, others don’t. But many do not recognize the events they have lived anymore in what is reflected by the media.

There are just too many occasions in which politicians  and journalists behave asymmetrically, with selective memory and amnesia. And other cases they draw symmetry where there is no symmetry at all. They want to confuse our ideas on history. They are faking it. They are PATACCARI.

There are too many journalists who are interviewed on TV by other journalists. A mirror game, you quote me, I quote you back. In the TV interviews some journalists have under their name the “member of parliament” label. Others carry the solemn caption of “historian”.

I thought historians were scholars studying documents in universities, doing research, year after year…not people who did word-crunching for a living. But it is sure that now anybody, politicians and journalists on top, can claim to have a chair at a university in our poor country. Wiki-them, they depict themselves as “historian and journalist…”. So the circle is closed. Tout se tient. These people will write the history books. They are doing it already. After so much boots-licking and microphone-holding, they deserve a comfy office.

If you want to see footage on historical events in Italy, you can try Istituto Luce or RAI Teche. Do send an email to Luce in order to access historical filmed material. They will never answer to you. Try to ask to access the same at RAI. It is locked away by the “managers”, for their private cut-and-paste of history.

There are still journalists who wear out their shoes doing their metier. There are citizens who were witnesses or victims, who speak out (about Genova). BBC in 1989 produced two films on the fascism and we never got to see them. God save YouTube!

Paolo Rumiz is a journalist doing his job of investigating infinite shades of grey, and not selling ready-made all-black or all-white easy solutions from a chair in a university. Here are two articles – in italian I am sorry. They both cover the theme of the day, the foibe. And the asymmetries, forced symmetries, distorted memories, in a word, the fake history.

On the first article, he describes the fascist lagers in Italy. In the second, dated as of today, he reminds us that the Risiera di SanSabba was a nazi lager – because Triest was part of the reich – and so the parallel between foibe and Risiera is a nonsense.

But some politicians (and many journalists) don’t even know where Triest is on the map. Like with the poor woman dead today after 17 years of forced feeding, they just USE people, USE history instrumentally…and forget about them when they have reached their objectives. Their objectives? look where the fakes take you. Follow the tread…tout se tient. Triest is the key. They are looking for friction, and Triest has always been the perfect ignition point.

Both articles are on bora.la

Rumiz sulla rimozione della memoria storica in Italia

I volonterosi carnefici del duce

1969′s normalization

Yesterday MeinMann and I went to the Prague Spring exhibition at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni. Photos, novels, videos, poems and printed media about the 1968 events and the subsequent “normalization”. 20 years later the Velvet Revolution would sweep normalization away…

I was reading the book about the exhibition during the holidays in early January of this year. I found this poem by Zbynek Havlicek – which I could not find in english version so far – in the days in which Gaza was being bombed.

That overly zealous wiper blade closing the poem conveys the feeling of blind obsession of war and its mechanic, grinding advance.

Nelle mandibole politiche dei giorni

Otturate dai cingoli dei carri

Dorme

La coscienza del mondo

Con la sua unica morale

Dei condannati a morte

Pone sotto di se’ ragioni come mine

Mentre la grande schizofrenia della storia

Come una lancetta che si agita febbrile sui vetri delle auto

Si asciuga dalla fronte il  sudore invece della pioggia.

Photo and poem from the book “Praga da una primavera all’altra 1968-1969″ Forum Editrice