La mia musica preferita

Quando mi rilasso al PC mi piace ascoltare la musica degli anni sessanta e settanta. Gli autori che preferisco tra gli Italiani sono: Celentano, Fred Bongusto, Peppino Galiardi, gli Alunni del Sole, I Dik-Dick, Lucio Battisti e Alan Sorrenti (quello di Aria, prima maniera, per intenderci); tra gli stranieri mi piacciono I Pink Floyd, I Genesis (ma sino a Peter Gabriel, non oltre), B.B. King, John Mayall e tanti altri.

Quando sono malinconico metto un po’ di Fado portoghese, della musica napoletana, del Flamenco (Gipsy King!) o del buon Blues.

Non disdegno neppure, di quando in quando, le cantanti italiane: Mina, Patty Pravo, Dalida e Iva Zanicchi sono tra le mie preferite.

Tra i cantautori mi piacciono molto Fabrizio De Andrè, Paolo Conte, Gino Paolo, Luigi Tenco, Ivano Fossati, Leo Ferrè.

Non mi dispiacciono neppure Ettore Petrolini e Maurice Chevalier, ma lì siamo già fuori dalla musica e ci troviamo nell’avanspettacolo, nel cabaret.

Poi ci sono tanti altri che mi emoziono nell’ascoltare. Ma qui ho citato soltanto quelli che ascolto con maggiore frequenza.

Per esempio, da giovane, mi piacevano molto Gabriella Ferri e Jimi Hendrix; per un periodo sono stato perfino un seguace dell’heavy metal (AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, quella roba là) e del Punk (ma quello è stato un amore veramente fugace e passeggero); era la nebbia londinese che mi aveva un po’ offuscato i sensi e non distinguevo bene la vera musica dal rumore.

Oggi, se dovessi ritornare a teatro, prediligerei un buon concerto di musica classica oppure un’opera lirica (la Carmen di Bizet, la Tosca di Puccini e il Barbiere di Rossini sono tra le mie preferite).

Ma quando sono al PC e scrivo o lavoro, non c’è migliore compagnia per me della musica italiana degli anni sessanta e settanta!Quando mi rilasso al PC mi piace ascoltare la musica degli anni sessanta e settanta. Gli autori che preferisco tra gli Italiani sono: Celentano, Fred Bongusto, Peppino Galiardi, gli Alunni del Sole, I Dik-Dick, Lucio Battisti e Alan Sorrenti (quello di Aria, prima maniera, per intenderci); tra gli stranieri mi piacciono I Pink Floyd, I Genesis (ma sino a Peter Gabriel, non oltre), B.B. King, John Mayall e tanti altri.

Quando sono malinconico metto un po’ di Fado portoghese, della musica napoletana, del Flamenco (Gipsy King!) o del buon Blues.


Non disdegno neppure, di quando in quando, le cantanti italiane: Mina, Patty Pravo, Dalida e Iva Zanicchi sono tra le mie preferite.


Tra i cantautori mi piacciono molto Fabrizio De Andrè, Paolo Conte, Gino Paolo, Luigi Tenco, Ivano Fossati, Leo Ferrè.


Non mi dispiacciono neppure Ettore Petrolini e Maurice Chevalier, ma lì siamo già fuori dalla musica e ci troviamo nell’avanspettacolo, nel cabaret.


Poi ci sono tanti altri che mi emoziono nell’ascoltare. Ma qui ho citato soltanto quelli che ascolto con maggiore frequenza.


Per esempio, da giovane, mi piacevano molto Gabriella Ferri e Jimi Hendrix; per un periodo sono stato perfino un seguace dell’heavy metal (AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, quella roba là) e del Punk (ma quello è stato un amore veramente fugace e passeggero); era la nebbia londinese che mi aveva un po’ offuscato i sensi e non distinguevo bene la vera musica dal rumore.


Oggi, se dovessi ritornare a teatro, prediligerei un buon concerto di musica classica oppure un’opera lirica (la Carmen di Bizet, la Tosca di Puccini e il Barbiere di Rossini sono tra le mie preferite).


Ma quando sono al PC e scrivo o lavoro, non c’è migliore compagnia per me della musica italiana degli anni sessanta e settanta!

London for ever - 29

Michelle was a Parisian girl. The two had met in London and had always been together. Her charm was not the ordinary allurement that usually circles  on long-limbed French girls, a bit diaphanous, with the features of their faces eternally ingenuous and gentle.

 It derived instead from her rather cheerful and carefree air, symptomatic of those who can live day by day, with no particular moods linked to sentimental events, work issues, or perhaps existential complications. Much more than her  attitude of disenchanted non-chalance, if not of deliberately informal and countercurrent behavior, it was astonishing the  contrast with the almost serious and formal behavior that Giampiero was going through even more than the hated bourgeois he declared to be still in fight with.

Michelle, on the other hand, was a painter and earned her living by selling her paintings and making portraits in Portobello and the other large London-based large markets; Her attendance allowed Giampiero not to lose all contact with a certain kind of culture and alternative minds, to which, though not in the depths of his being, he had been tied.

– “Whoever does not die,  comes alive, soon or later!” Giampiero said to the phone, returning my greeting, “What have you done all this time?”

– “I found a pub that resembles an amphitheater!” I said laughing- “and tonight performs a Rock band with square balls. What do you say?”

– “I say we were thinking about going down the corner to have a drink; But the idea of ​​a bit of good music would be even better. But where are you? “He asked then translating from English, as he sometimes did speaking Italian.

– “I’m here in Paddington Station, in a newspaper store”.

-” I get it. From Notting Hill is a step away. Wait for me to come. Maybe even with Michelle and a Parish friend who comes to visit us. I’ll see you right away!”

29. to be continued…

Memoirs of London - 10

Other street vendors were the papers sellers.  They also came almost exclusively from East London but it was very rare to find young people among them. They worked outdoors all year long, occupying the corners at the exit of the most important metropolitan stations, using some of the simple metallic box inside which the newspapers were and, sometimes,  a table with metal chair, and from there emitted some incomprehensible sounds that merged with the drafters  coming from the bowels of the earth, through the infinite meanders of the subway; and in those sounds one could no longer recognize the names of the heads of the daily newspapers Evening Standard and the Evening News, which they pronounced in a short,  deformed by habit, similar to the rattle of a wounded beast, to attract the  attention of the distracted and hurried passengers in transit to the entrances of underground tunnels. The Evening News was actually just an imitation of the most famous Evening Standard. The latter was published in multiple editions from seven a.m. until late at night, with a frequency between  two and three hours. From one issue to the other, only the first page was changed in order to attract the readers to brilliant news. It was distributed to such vendors with a truly fantastic delivery network.

The delivers came in black-yellow van, and from there, with the engine still on, without descending from the van,  they flown the  newspapers packages.

The Evening Standard did not have a precise political physiognomy (at least not in the sense that we Italians give it to this expression) and perhaps it alternated its ideology tuning  with the political parties ruling  the largest London administrative body: "The Great London Council ".

All those vendors gave me a strange impression: that they had always done  that job. Not only for the wheeze voice that characterized them, but also for their very dirty clothing. The skin of their face looked   dark, almost dirty, because of the exposure to the unhealthy air.

 It also seemed to me that they felt  always cold, even in the summer, as if in their bones it was penetrated the humidity and the chilling breath of the freezing drafts coming from the Tube.

 They wore gloved handcuffs in order to easily grab money and newspapers and warmed up with a tea-milk cup they bought take away from the nearest snack bar.

Despite  of their appearance, which in the days of intense fog blended with the surrounding landscape, becoming a characteristic element, like the red royal columns of the Royal Mail, the telephone booths and the black cabs, the sensations they conveyed were, however positive.

 I do not say they were cheerful, but may be jovial. A serene and resigned joviality, as if the diffusion of the events, from London and the whole world, contained in their newspapers, made them impermeable to emotions, placing them above the human events, as if they were impartial messengers  from the underground’s gods.

When passing by, where I was working, they never lacked to nod at me with  sympathy, at the same time giving making a sound which wanted to be  an "are you all right " but one could only hear a  hiss, like the wind that had entered into their bodies, consisting of three, perhaps only two syllables, veiled, almost died  in the throat.

10. to be continued...

Memoirs of London - 9

9.

One of them, who used to work in the ice cream sell, was Bob, who had made me an instructor, a few years earlier, in the short period of previous work placement: in particular cleaning and maintenance of the machine, and preparing ice creams and ice drinks.

He wasn’t  very tall (you would say surely more than five feet but less then six, with light hair, combed with a line-centered brush;  his eyes were green colored and very  moving on the features of the face, made a bit irregular by two slightly pronounced upper incisors.

 At the left lobe, with a lot of naturalness, he carried a small round gold earring, fashion, which on our country  was still beyond to come. His clothing was both simple and well-groomed. Particular attention, however, he showed on  the shoes and the t-shirts, on which, usually stood out of immeasurable, numerous gold chains, different in appearance and size, as our women do when they wore  the  ancient folk costumes.

Bob was definitely nice. Very uneasy, he was always around in the nearby shops, he was a jumper, or a grocer's colleague. In his "pitch", which was usually the most profitable, he had during the high season one or more aides on whom he uploaded, in a casual and good manner, most of the workload. When it happened to be in distribution, at peak times, sometimes he was bizarre.

Once, for instance, there was an  orderly and long queue of customers waiting to be served at  the ice cream machine,  up to the outside edge of the sidewalk.

Suddenly Bob said  he had to go and make a  phone call. And so saying, he showed customers a ten-penny coin, holding it high between the thumb and index finger of the left hand and hissing, with the upper lip slightly curled on the teeth, in a string of  glottis shots : "I'll be back in a minute!”.

After he had  disappeared into the store I tried to do my best on serving the customers. When he was back, seeing so many people still queuing,  he asked me kindly,

to set aside, tracing  a semicircle with his left forearm and grabbed a dozen cones, he was able to fill them all by turning his hand skillfully under the ice cream faucet, simultaneously driving the lever with his right hand, and while I was struggling to get ice cream in both my hands, to distribute them, the customers, cheered him up with admiration.  And it seemed that these customers had the magnitude, because there were more and more behind them, and Bob's show was repeated until the machine could keep on refrigerating.

But when he stayed away for a longer time he used to ask me, with a significant gesture of the index rubbed on her thumb, if

I had any  banknotes, which he called in his funny slang “wonga”.

It was at that time of my first novitiate in London that I started to love the English.

 If he did not have customers, he read the newspaper: The Sun, the Daily Mirror and, above all, the Evening Standard, a London daily newspaper that published everything about horse racing, the other sporting events of the day, as well as some local, political issues and seldom  internationals.

He did not read much concentrated or for a long time, since he looked up from time to time to whistle or recall the attention of some glamorous girl of passage, on the goodness of whose forms we did not always agree, and if I tried to drag him to comment on some political news or abroad eco-social argument, its responses were always superficial, albeit not evasive.

At first I noticed a certain surprise in his eyes when listening carefully to my reasoning, and I did not know how to interpret it.

As time went by, I realized that it must appear unusual and even bizarre to him  that an Italian  ice-cream seller , wanted  to deal with arguments that not even the English and the Londoners , like he was, would to be  interested on.

 So, though seen as a sort of  phenomenon, a bit funny and original, I realized that his attitude towards me went gradually changing, from the initial snobbery and indifference into a cordial, sincere sympathy  that I was not able to turn into a deeper friendship, perhaps also because of my immaturity and insecurity.

Bob and the other dealers, including his two brothers and a sister, had left the school shortly after they had solved their attendance obligations; indeed, many even before that term.

Rebellious and refractory to the harsh rules of the English teachers, they preferred the free life of the street; without hierarchical supervisors invading or rebuking and  without any form of obligation (it was not rare he changed bad  words with some overly demanding or unfortunate customer).

 And with a great pay over the average earnings of workers and employees.

9. to be continued... 

Brexit-III

Meanwhile sterling has slid to its lowest lever against the dollar in the last seven years. And many big companies in Britain have expressed the choose to remain in. These are part of the result for fearing Brexit.

It's useless to say the the political destiny of Mr Cameron is now in the polls. 

It's very hard to imagine his staying still in Dowining street if he looses his campaign for UK remaining in the European Union.

Now the debate between the two parties, pro Brexit and against, is getting warmer.

The Brexiters say UK will become greater again out of the European club. They also add that economic adavantages can be provided by bilateral agreements as many other countries have done with the EU; and they quote Canada, South Korea, India, China and many others.

Nevertheless observers note that bilateral economic treaties might not work the same with Great Britain. Furthermore there is much more involving of EU in the fight against terrorism that Britain could not achieve on its own.

It seems to me that most of the Brexiters issues are only nothing but a nostalgic dream over a greatness which can be reached only staying inside the European Union.

And this is woth also for France and Germany.

But the road for an integrated political EU is still hard; just paved with good intentions, at the very moment.

I still believe, none the same, the European Union has a great future: with or without English people.

3. the end.

Brexit -2

Britons already voted once the same issue in 1975, but that was another EU. At that time EU was still formed by only 9 members and the strict laces which today smother number 10 Downing were yet to come.

Today EU it's more bound to run after the six founder's dream: to become a federation of states with increasing power to the centre and less margins of sovereignity to the single states.
It's this the major worry of conservative's brexiters and fundamentally almost all the average  English media class people.
But pay attention please! We are talking of English people only!
And here start Mr Cameron politic ploblems involved with the poll appointment in june!
Scots have already claimed the call of new referendum to leave the British Union if Brexiters win! And same have made the Northern Irish which threats the reunification with Dublin's  Republic if Brexiters will be the majority.
And another  great amount of problems are coming for mr Cameron on the financial  and economic side both inside and outside the British borders.

2. to be continued...

Brexit

The referendum which will ask all British people to express if they want to stay in the European Union or not has been called by Premier  D. Cameron for June 23rd (it will be on a thursday).
The voters have to say if on their opinion is better for UK to proceed on Its own through the enigmatic and crucial challenges  this epoch of globalisation is putting forward the western states, specially the more advanced and reachest, including the mass of poor people moving from Asia and Africa on the routes of a search of a better life.
Though Great Britain has an important political and economic background, mostly due to its colonial heritage, it's a relatively small country compared with the emerging colusses such as China, India and Brazil.
I'm personally convinced that the European Union must tighten its politic bonds to form a stronger political union capable to face the increasing and rising economies of the globalized new world.
Nevertheless, though I'm fond of the British culture (both of english and scottish and even of Irish), I've alawys seen London very uncertain on the path of European integration.
And I could say the same for Paris (of course for different reasons from Great Britain).
But now we are coming to a turning point.
I see on the next future a double scenario: if Great Britain decides to go out, the other partner will probably tighten closely trying to find new strengh and new reasons to stay together; if, vice versa, British voters call for staying also in this case the other partners will ask Great Britain to abandon its hesitation, which has often trespassed into ambiguity.
1. to be coninued...

Dante and his time - II

 

Dante is the founder of a new way to see and to write about love; he shares this role of founder of  this new literary current, called “the sweet new style” (dolce stilnovo) with Guido Cavalcanti and Cino da Pistoia.

Dante lives in a period which sees the end of an world: the balance between the Papacy and the Empire is at his end.

When Charles the Valois enters in Florence, in 1301, at the head of the Black Guelphs, Dante (belonging to the White Faction of the same Guelph party, traditional enemy of the imperialist Ghibeline’s party) is condemned and exiled; he never will see its town again.

The White Faction were neither for the Emperor nor for the Pope; they were just for the total autonomy of the Communes from both the institutions headed by the Germans and by the Roman Church.

If we don’t keep in mind this fundamental detail, we risk to  make the same mistake has committed A.N. Wilson in his last book we have already reviewed in this blog (but  you can find more complete reviews on line: especially by the main news papers: the Indipendent, the Observer, the Telegraph, The Guardian etc) defining the great Italian poet, incoherent and even political instable till madness.

As acutely has pointed out a well founded Italian writer, Angelo Ruggeri (who, by the way, is writing an exhaustive answer to the Wilson’s Dante in love) it must be observed that Dante, in his last 20 years of his life, was an exiled man, sued by the Roman Inquisitors as heretic, with great risks, not only  for his liberty, but also for his life.

That’s the main reason, according to Angelo Ruggeri’s theory, why Dante made alliances with Ghibelines, in order to be protected, better than with the same Guelph’s partisans (which black’s fraction, by the way, was responsible of his political and personal disgrace).

… to be continued…