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Post della categoria politics.

Rock’n'roll, at last

13 April 2010, 2:00 pm


Evolution, music & video by SM, vocals by Kelly X
(right-click and save as a mov file)

This song explores a terrible human condition, showing that there is light at the end of the tunnel. We all have lovely parents, and we’re pretty nice folks ourselves: we would never, ever say bad things about them. We know we’re nice also because there are some gutter white trash, pieces of shit, honky ass, red neck motherfuckers out there, and we sure aren’t one of them, right?

Unfortunately, in this mean world, there are some less fortunate people: the children of gutter white trash, pieces of shit, honky ass, red neck motherfuckers. This song is for them. Remember: no matter how gutter white trash, pieces of shit, honky ass red neck motherfuckers your parents are, you still have hope: just get the fuck out of that fucking barn right now!

Mi dispiace, ma questa canzone è intraducibile. Racconta della liberazione di una ragazza figlia di genitori assai antiquati, razzisti e spiacevoli. La fanciulla, dopo aver lasciato la natìa casetta di campagna, finalmente può disporre della sua esistenza come meglio crede.

PS: Thanks, grazie, merci, danke for the heaps of views, embedding, messages. You’re the best audience there is.

Categorie: art, ideas, me, music, musica, personal, play!, politica, politics, sex/porno, sex/porno.
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Tv Blues

16 February 2010, 3:38 pm

There’s a documentary you guys should watch. It was reviewed by the New York Times (“It feels as if you were watching a transmission from another planet”) and it should be in (very selected) theaters in the US right now (and then probably on Hulu, for those of you who live in the US or browse with an US IP). It’s called Videocracy, it’s by an italian-swedish director and it shows pretty well what Berlusconism is like. It’s not a “fair and balanced” movie but it’s true and very funny, and it answers a faq I get: “Why don’t you live in Italy anymore?”*

* Considering that mr Videocracy was elected with a landslide of votes for the third time.

Categorie: italy?, politics.
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Bus of shame

1 October 2009, 1:27 pm

There’s a new bus line in Milan, Italy. It has bars on the windows and local policemen inside. It roams the city, searching for illegal aliens (a condition that since a couple of weeks is a crime over here). It stops at regular bus stops, the cops jump down, ask for IDs and take people without papers to the Identification and Expulsion center. Obviously they devote their attention mostly to non-whites. This aberration has been reported only by a few newspapers, including La Repubblica, but not by Tv. Please spread the news – over here it’s getting weirder every day. (Click on the photo for more images) (This news in english, from Adn/Kronos)

Categorie: italy?, politics.
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Pimp rule

12 August 2009, 3:57 am

trfd3People often ask me why I want to leave Italy and become dutch. One of my main motives is explained in a nasty but realistic article by Michael Wolff on Vanity Fair, entitled All Broads Lead to Rome:

“A Berlusconi-employed journalist (…) explains, “Italians need someone like him because he is just like them. Everybody has a mistress. Everybody cheats on taxes. Everybody does something illegal because it’s impossible to live legally.”

I don’t do any of these things, so life here can get really complex and frustrating. What’s more:

“Also, we love authoritarians. We need a strong man. If not Mussolini, well, then someone like Mussolini.”

The italians actually might, I sure don’t.

Categorie: italy?, politics.
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We’re all going to fish. Soon.

22 May 2009, 11:26 am

Many of my american friends are horrified by the fact that I often watch Fox news: they’re liberal and cannot understand how I can get my news from such a conservative station. It’s very simple: I don’t. I watch Fox for another reason, that is entertainment value. And believe me, on that there’s no competition between say Glenn Beck and Rachel Maddow, and while the former entices me to the point of ecstasy (like when he weeps abundantly on air because he “loves America”) the latter bores me to tears (also because at the same time there are often Operation Repo reruns on Tru TV, and that’s hard to beat). Glenn is pure entertainment, and so are Hannity, Shep and Poppa Bear. Here are the first 4 messages from the brand new Glenn Beck twitter page:

  1. I like fish.
  2. we’re all going to die. Soon.
  3. this “tweet” thing pisses me off and besides, I can’t guarantee the train travel thing.
  4. This is my first ‘tweet’. I’ll try to keep the lying about train travel to a minimum.

Isn’t that sublime? Much better than any liberal tweeting (usually witty and coolish). I only have one perplexity: why does Fox label itself as Fair and Balanced? That’s not why I watch it: I do it for the exact opposite reason.

Categorie: politics, tv, usa.
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Primæ Noctis Minister

6 May 2009, 11:54 am

Many people here in the US asked me why I’m permanently leaving Italy. Among other reasons, I simply cannot stand anymore to live in a country that has elected, with overwhelming majority, Silvio Berlusconi as Prime Minister. His latest, public controversy with his wife – over his unabashed passion for very young women – falls perfectly within his pimpy, little Cesar style. This isn’t a simple case of Bushism, I’m not surprised italians elected him and I will not be when they will elect him again and again: he is the Prime Minister most italians chose, elected and deserve. I’m just not italian enough to appreciate a guy for which the rules, any rule (including laws), is an obstacle to be removed. I have good reasons to believe most italians truly appreciate his style and approve of his conduct. I feel just like a transexual now: someone born in a nationality he doesn’t recognize as his own. But I’ll be dutch very soon, and so Berlusconi will be just another international clown, from a country that produces the best food in the world – and unfortunately very little else.

Categorie: italy?, politics.
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Get Bin Laden soon

6 April 2009, 11:30 am

One of the most awaited moments of the beginning of Barak Obama’s presidency was certainly his debut on the international scene – that just happened this past week at the G20 meeting in Strasbourg, France (one of the most spectacularly boring cities I’ve ever visited). While most of the US press focused on Michelle Obama’s wardrobe and how the couple navigated the rigid british royal etiquette, some new organizations (most notably Fox News) noticed the huge change in language and content from the previous administration. And while the most conservative commentators feared the effects of this new attitude, it sounded very right to me. As I’ve told anyone who asked , the main relational problem that the USA is facing today concerns its place as a nation among other equal nations. I believe the new White House language will not only improve US international relations, making it much easier for americans to travel abroad (without being hassled about US foreign policy), but in time will substantially improve US security both here and worldwide.

Plus, there’s another more subtle but perhaps even more important change in Obama’s words: he knows the value of symbolic speaking. This is an essential (and long awaited, at least by me) change, especially when addressing those parts of the world where symbolic language (and acts, such as the 9/11 attacks) is the most understood. So, once again, I’m glad mr Obama is in command. Now there’s just one more thing he needs to do…

Categorie: chicagoan, ideas, politics.
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The pursuit of laziness

22 February 2009, 4:35 pm

One of my mother’s favorite books was a little essay written in 1883 by a french socialist “journalist, literary critic, political writer and activist”, Paul Lafargue. He must have been quite a character; the book, written while he was in jail, is entitled The Right to be Lazy and it’s available online. “It polemicizes heavily against contemporary liberal, conservative and even socialist ideas of work” (hence everybody), says the book’s own Wikipedia entry: Lafargue criticises “the primacy of the “right to work”, and argues that laziness, combined with human creativity, is an important source of human progress.” I cannot but agree with Lafargue, even though I’ve never actually managed to read the book.

Categorie: ideas, politics.
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Stimulus Blues

15 February 2009, 6:22 pm

There’s a lot of debate today about the so called Stimulus Package, and if the investment of this huge amount of public money will produce and save jobs and will effectively stimulate the american economy. While some spending seem to have a simple, obvious result (building roads will create new jobs in road construction), other are more dubious or indirect. There’s also much talk about if Obama’s economic measures resemble those deployed by Roosevelt in the 30s, in the phase known until today as The Great Depression. Here’s a little story about the long term effects of one of those measures – from Wikipedia:

Through a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies, John Lomax was able to set out in June 1933 on the first recording expedition under the Library’s auspices, with Alan Lomax (then eighteen years old) in tow. (…) Robert Winslow Gordon, Lomax’s predecessor at the Library of Congress, had written (…) that, “Nearly every type of song is to be found in our prisons and penitentiaries”. Folklorists Howard Odum and Guy Johnson also had observed that, “If one wishes to obtain anything like an accurate picture of the workaday Negro he will surely find his best setting in the chain gang, prison, or in the situation of the ever-fleeing fugitive.” But what these folklorists had merely recommended John and Alan were able to put into practice. In their successful grant application they wrote, that prisoners, “Thrown on their own resources for entertainment . . . still sing, especially the long-term prisoners who have been confined for years and who have not yet been influenced by jazz and the radio, the distinctive old-time Negro melodies.” They toured Texas prison farms recording work songs, reels, ballads, and blues from prisoners such as James “Iron Head” Baker, Mose “Clear Rock” Platt, and Lightnin’ Washington.

In July they acquired a state-of-the-art, 315-pound acetate phonograph disk recorder. Installing it in the trunk of his Ford sedan, Lomax soon used it to record, at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, a twelve-string guitar player by the name of Huddie Ledbetter, better known as “Lead Belly,” whom they considered one of their most significant finds. During the next year and a half, father and son continued to make disc recordings of musicians throughout the South.

That’s how the Blues was “discovered” by Lomax. There’s a heartbreaking account of Alan Lomax’s 1941 visit to Stovall, Mississippi (paid by the Library of Congress), where he found and recorded the then unknown Muddy Waters.

It might have not seem so at the time, but this is the best spent money in the history of stimulus packages. Not only it allowed the world to know the Blues (the most influential art of the 20th century), but these recordings spawned hundreds of musical genres that fed millions of americans for decades (and still do), producing more jobs than any major company has ever done – and the coolest music the world knows today.

Categorie: chicagoan, music, politics.
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Save sex now!

8 February 2009, 10:34 am

Here’s my latest attempt to save the world: a series of digital postcards and buttons. If you agree with this urgent message, share, remix and link the images as you like. They are released under a CC attribution license.

Categorie: art, politics.
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