Apr 29 2006
She has a Greek father, she grew up in Queens, she is connected with the Greek mafia. I’m Italian, and we invented The Mafia. But Italian and Greek mafia cannot live in the same place, so one of us has to die.
I had to kill her, there was nothing I could do.
Goodbye, Julianna!
Apr 19 2006
there is a thing, called fair-play, that’s sometimes lacking in politics. the already mentioned bush vs. gore campaign was intense, as you can read in this bbc article, involving the final decision of the supreme court. and that was the end of it.
in these days, italy is in the same exact situation. the right coalition approved a new electoral law right before the last election, a move that the left coalition strongly opposed. the two main features of the new law were:
narrator: for the same law (defined a porcata - like bullshit - from his author, the master of foreign politics roberto calderoli) and a bunch of votes (in the order of 20k) the left coalition won. or at least has now a majority of votes. since that moment, things of all kind happened, as summarized below:
narrator: the ministry of internals recounts disputed votes, which drop down from 40k to 2k
narrator: the vote of italians ouside the country gave two more senators to the left coalition, so now they have a (small) majority in the upper chamber (Senato)
narrator: mr roberto calderoli, famous for his political naïveté is the one who made the new electoral law and now wants to delete it. he contests the fact that a small party in the left coalition received a bunch of votes who should be invalidated
narrator: the supreme court of italy assigned the victory to romano prodi, but berlusconi still refuses to admit it: silvio, why don’t u count the votes, so that you can count the ones you want to keep and ignore the others?
Apr 17 2006
My vanity. I couldn’t resist the temptation of uploading the video of me conducting Beethoven on youtube.com. It’s sometimes broken but still was a great experience.
Coriolanus is a Roman aristocrat well respected in the Roman Senate for its action in capturing the Volscian town of Corioli. He was permanently banished from Rome upon being convicted on charges of misappropriation of public funds. He then turned against Rome making allegiance with the same Volscians he had defeated and attacking Rome.
In the chronicles by the roman writers, Coriolanus, in front of the city of Rome with the Volscians troops, is reached by his mother and his wife imploring to change his mind. Coriolanus then withdraws the troops and moves to the city of Antium.
In the adaptation of Heinrich von Collins, the one for which Beethoven wrote this Ouverture, Coriolanus changes his mind in front of his mother’s tears. Thereafter he cannot accept the idea of being a betrayer of his city and commits suicide.
The Romantic version Coriolanus is then a controversial and passionate hero, in the middle between the impulsive hate against his compatriots, the immortal love for his relatives and a strong belief in values mixed with the sense of guilt.
Apr 14 2006
no, it wasn’t fun… when yesterday, with lovely Emily i went to Dave’s Coffe House and we had a tasty oreo cheesecake and there is this grand piano, there, i was eating and dreaming of playing it
cake was over and i brought myself to the piano but hey, it’s about six months i’m out of practice. i started with a very slow preambulum from the fifth partita of bach to realize how rusty i was… but there’s no way to get the rust away without keeping playing
i tried everything i had in mind, but my memory was a little out of order as well, and besides the very usual symphony from the second partita - bach again - everything was a little… chopped, and chunk of music here and there. to be honest, i did the whole first movement of the sonata op. 79 of beethoven.
anyways, after forty minutes the guy from the counter comes to me.
him: you’re a very good pianist but i’m sorry i have to ask you to stop
me: oh are you guys closing?
him: no, it’s just people are bored of piano
dammit! dammit! dammit!. i look around me, the desert. there is no f**king soul around me, except for my lovely Emily that claps at every chunk. did i make anybody run away? and this awful barista just fires me like that? that was mean
the truth: for decades (well no more than two since i’m 28) people asked me to play the stupidest things at the piano. they never enjoyed the music that i like. they want ridicule motives that they played on the piano when they were ten years old and yet awful pianists. i’m sick of that!!! i’m damn sick! i never made any exception to this and i never will, ok? go ask your silly friend to play something silly. my motto is:
better to play badly some good music than to play good some popular shit
Apr 11 2006
The piglet always tells me that I’m de-italianizing: I don’t drink cappuccino at night, to which I prefer tea. I still like pizza but there is another chance: that Italy is americanizing.
The political elections struggle is over and all political journalists observe its similarity to the Bush/Gore fight to the last ballot. The left side won the lower wing of the Parliament (Camera) for 20k votes, and the upper wing (Senato) for 2 seats. Everybody knows that in Italy this means instability.
I dream to hear the left saying: “We won with a reduced margin, much smaller than initially expected, but we’ll do our best and, in the worst, we’ll go back to democratic elections” and a right saying: “The elections show an almost perfectly divided country but still victory is for the left, and they have the right to make a team to govern”.
Instead, there is now a left-side toasting for a victory of Pirro, a right side asking for a count check, and no side with a common sense of reality.
Still, I can’t frankly believe that almost a half of my country voted again for a person that represents:
If this is the country that Italians want, I’m glad to be in the middle of a de-italianization process.
La Lingua Salvata. Storia di una Giovinezza (Adelphi) by Elias Canetti
