Ortega y Gasset once said that everything we write should be “two-horned”. I would say, subversive. Uncomfortable. If not even troublesome. Writing with no stake, writing for the sake of agreement and harmony, avoiding the slightest element of discord is a deplorable self-forgetting gesture. No theoretical studies, no sms-es, no blogs, no essays, no novels, no scripts, no lyrics and no love letters will be remembered as long as they fail to deal with less manageable problems. Empty words fade quite easily. They rarefy themselves. In order to make them count, they should fall as heavy as stones, or they should stand right up like aspens. They should lead to nothingness, ecstasy or a better future.

PS: I’ve always liked the first single from Morrissey’s Ringleader of the Tormentors (2006), “You Have Killed Me”. I even talked about the whole album, in a – somehow – tumultuous manner, remember? As a rule, what I liked once, I will certainly like twice, three times, ten thousand times, ’till death do us part. I am awfully repetitive and incapable of getting bored. This album has never left my hard disks ever since 2006. “Dear God Please Help Me”, “Life is a Pigsty”, “I Will See You In Far Off Places” are refined samples of how Morrissey’s disconsolate lyrics and Visconti’s sense of “harmonized noise” can breath the breath of tormented life into the nostrils of today’s Pop. Take a look. Lend an ear. Watch out for his words: ” You Have Killed Me”.

The far ones get further, the fat ones get fatter, the funny ones get funnier, the fancy ones get (lost in) fool’s paradise and the married ones get married.

Each day, you waste the things you learn. You did the same in the past. And you’re also the kind who is most likely to waste what will learn in the future. You never say much, just the very necessary words to get by; sometimes a password, sometimes a curse, sometimes a yawn, but most often a verse. And you never argue. Nothing seems right anyway. Everything is rotten. Better leave. Words are short-legged and the ones you have learned never fit the world, they only fit the mail sacks and the blank pages of a book. Each page proudly carries its very own word.”I can’t relate theory to practice and I’m afraid of flying” you use to say. Somehow proud. The thing you like most is to look hurt or incomprehensible. Everyone thinks you prefer to save the words for better purposes, “he has the right words right there, hidden in his sleeve” people say respectfully. And they all nod. They understand. You like the pretty ones, the humble ones who learned their lessons well. You love to tutor them and your willing to teach has nothing in it that is not noble. Your ability to waste time, ideas, feelings, principles is indeed remarkable, “it does take a lot of myself, you know”. And people stare at you in amazement: “man, he does waste stuff, doesn’t he?”, and then “Teach us how to get rid of what we know and be like you”. And you taught them everything beginning with the unwashed socks, ending with the plenary powers that Love has over you, knowing they’ll learn everything so well that they will, in the end, of course, fail. They don’t know that words come and go. Never mind the words.PS: new drawing (watercolors and pen) above. It’s called “The Tree of Life” and you can click it for making it bigger.

PS2: Tom Waits’s CD-set Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards (2006) is a masterpiece. You know, I like the tango and the waltz. I have always been old enough to like these rhythms, to instill them. And I like avantgarde and jazz as well. And Waits’s personality and his eclectic way of writing (remember Bone Machine? What an astonishing nightmare!). Today, I choose “Little Man” and “Little Drop of Poison”. Worths a listening.

Blogging mania. I read many bad things about it. And, believe it or not, I tend to agree with what the critics say. Even with the terribly boring ones repeating the same good old clichés about the intriguing contrast between the hypertrophied individuality of the blogger and the comfortable anonymity offered by a nickname (and, of course, by a secret IP address) of the forumer.
Nowadays, there’s is nothing so bad or so obscure that an on-line community cannot make it worse. Give the registered user (or worse: the uncommitted visitor) a powerful, problematic word like, say, “religion”; or “death”; or “fan”; or “discrimination”; or “sex”; or “bush”; or “nutrition”; or “cancer”; or “education”; or “anonymity”. Within no more than two days, the most sophisticated – technically and psychologically – replication strategies will be put into practice by obscure minds who want to built solid reputations based on obscure needs and nicks. And each persona, based on his or her likes, dislikes, moods, and foods, will use a couple of on-line identities in order to satisfy each and every instance of his or her consciousness.
What does the blogger have to do with the visitor of some secret virtual land, you might ask? OK, you’re right. Unlike the forumer who, sometimes, is ashamed of his or her “multiple personality disorder”, the blogger is probably a lost case; too vain to see that there’s nothing more obscure than a tiny Ego making private (ergo: common, indistinct) statements on its life course; too aggressive and pompous to realize that there is nothing more out of sight than a public family album. Thinking in extremes, one could say that both the blogger and the forumer have a “handling problem”: they can’t manage their own nothingness, they ended up by dealing with their intimacy in anomalous, “aberrant” ways. Due to the “privacy deprivation” and the unspecific on-line exposure, their virtues and their vices easily drift into irrelevance. Now that’s a commonsensical statement you’d say. It is, indeed. Admitting it, doesn’t make it any special. Actually the only special thing about our intimacy (which includes our very own madness and our most sound judgment) is its… basically private character. And the only special thing about a statement as such is its silly tautological force.
If it’s easy to lie in everyday life, lying on line is ten thousand times easier. It goes the same with telling the truth. And following the reasoning: if, in real life, it’s quite easy to make opposite affirmations about one and the same thing, doing it on line is ten thousand times easier. And so on. The internet is as light as a feather. Its users must be ten thousand times lighter. A refined thinking is one click away from an obtuse debate. No sane human can survive to such a contrasting neighbourhood unless he or she leaves behind his or her natural thickness and goes for a conscious process of losing weight, substance and credit.
Happy blogging/posting everybody.PS: No specific musical recommendations today; just a generic thought: “Strawberry fields forever”. Amen.

Oh, but please, ladies and gentlemen, don’t be afraid to be unhappy!

I say: I sit on my leather sofa, drinking ginger tea, I’ve just watched Bergman’s “Aus dem Leben der Marionetten” and I am about to start reading the latest Cartarescu; from time to time, I will split a fig in four and I’ll try to eat it avoiding the mess; the living room is warm and shady, the bee-like city noise is constant, uniform, intrusive and I like it, it could make a grown-up man sleepy, but it could surely keep a child awake. The latest (re-done) canvas has a funky smell and a hideous look, it lies on the floor next to a thick candle and an anti-tobacco bottle of room fragrance, no one is smoking of course, but I like to pretend I do. And all these are the basic concepts of my summer afternoon life. They measure the duration of domestic things and they give my existence a synthetical unity, they, at the long last, belong to me in a rather inscrutable way: I can hardly recognize them as being mine, but I can easily recognize myself in them. There is something in this red-and-black pillows, in this magazine, in these books and these canvases hanging on the walls or sitting on the floor, in this cup of tea, in the hysterical car alarm down in the parking place – I said – there is something in all these that is insufficiently mine. Something unconvincing and inadequate, something so remarkably aberrant that I simply feel like being thrown away from my own flat.
In some summer afternoons, when everything is music, peace, fragrance and harmony, from condition to condition, from cause to cause, from effect to effect, people suddenly feel they are no longer able to satisfy their own requirements, so they frown to themselves, shake their heads in amused contempt and, politely, ask themselves to leave.

PS: One falls back in one’s safe matrix with tracks like Dolly Parton’s “To Know Him Is To Love Him” (what a wonderful intro!) and one of my Velvet Underground’s favorites, “Venus in Furs”. Speaking about Cale, his collaboration with Brian Eno led to a refined album called Wrong Way Up. Rather harmonic and uptempo, to my surprise.Today I’d go for “Cordoba”. And I can’t help but adding to my playlist one more tune: the poor, beloved “Rocky Raccoon”.

The day we’ll stop lying, the world will stop turning.

How little we know of ourselves if we think we actually avoid to deliver evasive answers, to have misconceptions, or to take actions in the name of our illusions! No. This is exactly what we do: we cleverly avoid the situations in which we are forced to cooperate with the rough reality. We don’t want to cooperate. We just love the seeming autonomy offered by our lies and mis/disbelieving. We allow ourselves the liberty of seizing our world, often freeing ourselves from the condition of time and knowledge. Some avoid the future tense. Some the past tense. Some love to play the fool or the ignorant. Some others, like me, never wanted to learn what causality actually means. Artful self-entertainment. That’s why the sun stays still, while we keep spinning.

PS: This painting, “Two Worlds And No Reality”, is finally done. It has been the most time and energy-taking canvas ever. I’ve changed the style, the expression, the color palette, the premises etc. Click on it for a better view.

PS2: My love-and-hate relationship with Rufus Wainwright’s songs is still actual. Back to the latest Release the Stars; “Going to a Town” and “Between my legs” keep winning. Antidotes: Merz’s “Dangerous Heady Love Scheme” (from the amazing album Loveheart) and T-Rex “Get it on (Bang a gong)” which is, of course, the ringtone to my mobile.

Is there any hope for the future of realistic art? People from Art Renewal Center have a positive (but highly combative) thinking. They complain about students not being taught the basic drawing skills which, of course, condemns them to enrol in the modern (abstract) movement forever and ever amen. Each one with his or her own version of reality that is. No talent, no perspective, no technique, no studies, no nude models, no evaluation tools, just a gaily, ostentatious freedom. Be it impressionism, cubism (help!), pop-art, a devilish Hockney who discredited the old masters’s skills or simply the post modern minimalism, they call it brainwashing; the dictatorial, intimidating pressure of the subjective thinking.
We all know, deep in our hearts, that their hysterical claims are not completely out of line. We all know that independent modern thinking is not that independent. On the contrary. Lacking some objective evaluation tools, the only thing we can do to figure out the value of a modern painting is by confronting it with the “trends”. Today’s taste-makers and trend-setters make aleatory statements about aleatory themes, they have a high-hat attitude towards anything that looks or feels like academic thinking, they love the chic and the ugly, they can easily embarrass you and they live in New York. And so we all had troubles in making a difference between a successful abstraction and a common cadmium red deep spot placed in a common ocean of ivory black. That is, we all have been suspected of lacking “the vision”, “the sensibility” or “the intelligence” required for appraising or contemplating a prestigious work of modern art. The stark contradiction between two simultaneous and fundamentally modern “requirements”: 1. being a liberating, authentic, visionary artist/art consumer and 2. being a goer along so that you won’t be rejected by the self-sufficient modern movement, makes you either hypocrite or schizophrenic. The traditionalists want us back to bird painting, crystal drawings and study of waves. They complain about Matisse’s flatness, Renoir’s lack of grace, Picasso’s ill intended narrowness, Francis Bacon’s rude approach of the traditional figures, and, of course, David Hockney’s damned make-up mirrors and prisms. Their comments about the importance of reason, proportions and light are usually irrational, unbalanced, obscure. They might be the green-eyed academist monsters who have troubles in seeing the refined continuity between the classic tradition and Cezanne, Matisse or Picasso who only made “motivated” and innovative artistic moves, who knew what artistic freedom and control mean, who never took a transaction between sheer reality and sheer inspiration for granted. Even Miro kept his feet on the ground and, in a way or another, he based his art in reality. As for a very modern Bacon, Hockney, Freud or Balthus, they’ve certainly brought back a certain (twisted) taste for realistic painting and highly specific working techniques. Then what are those guys from Art Renewal Center talking about? How green one can be for treating one century and a half of modern painting as if it’d be signed by Pollock only? Behind a biased, but understandable defensive thinking of a minority talking about the oppressive power of majority, we couldn’t miss a rather naked – therefore timid – truth: no skills, no standards; no talent, no freedom.

PS: I got back to McCartney’s latest album Memory Almost Full and I claim “Only Mama Knows” and “You Tell Me” to be the best tracks I’ve heard this year; together, of course, with Helena Josefsson’s “Pirate King”, “Never, Never (reprise)” and “Fire”, the B side of the single with the same name from the world-class album Dynamo. Now you can also hear it on her myspace.

“Apollinaire was very careful with money, too. One night he invited Max and me over to his place. Marie Laurencin was with him. He had bought a good-sized sausage and had cut off eight slices – two for each of us I suppose – but he didn’t offer us any. He and Marie Laurencin had been drinking and were pretty high. After we’d been there a few minutes they left the room to be alone together. Since it looked to us as though that sausage was going to be a long time coming, Max and I each ate one of the slices Apollinaire had cut off. When Apollinaire and Marie Laurencin came back into the room, the first thing Apolllinaire did was count the slices. When he saw there were only six he looked at us suspiciously, but he didn’t say anything; he just cut off two more. In a few minutes they left the room again and Max and I ate those two. We had hardly got them down before Apollinaire was back again, counting the ones that remained. Still six. He looked puzzled but cut off two more and left again. By the time he came back for good, the whole sausage had gone, two slices at the time.”

(From “Life with Picasso” by lovely Françoise Gilot, pages 74, 75).

PS: New canvas above: “Show Attendance”. Click on it for a full-sized view.

PS2: What was wrong with Laleh’s interview at “Stina” really? NOTHING WAS WRONG. The answers were far more suitable than the questions. Stina was a monument of inadequateness, obstinateness and false, emphatic empathy. In spite of her realizing the “catastrophe”, she kept on approaching Laleh in the same way, unable to adjust her questions and expectations. Laleh, of course, didn’t sing instead of answering questions, as reported; she was singing off inhuman, Oprah-like interrogatory (“what happened with your brother and father?”????). Generally speaking, I deplore people’s lack of flexibility and the target audience of Stina’s show.