What do men see in women’s eyes? Everything that holds the world together: care, pity, trust, lust, grace. What do men fail to see in women’s eyes? Everything that tears the world apart: hate, rage, grudge, pride, and an atrocious thirst for power.

If, one day, he’d catch a glimpse of her ferocious ambition, he’d fall to the ground. He couldn’t watch  the deadly strength of her ego, and live on.

The vacuity, the non-existence spies on us from behind the woman’s eyes; behind her ovaries, the existence lies in wait.

PS: Maybe not the best track on the album, but it seemed to be the only high quality upload from Merz’s absolutely amazing Moi et mon camion.

I am what I am because of Elias Canetti’s writings. I owe him a certain professional courage, I owe him reflections, I owe him habits and commitments.

I rarely write (and talk) about those artists and those ideas that literally changed my life. I cultivate an embarrassing, heavy silence around my sources of inspirations, around my innermost affinities, motivations, likings, goals and fixations.  And Canetti is the master of this silent ceremony. When I first read his writings I was still in college. Back then, I couldn’t seriously believe a chemist can turn into a humanist, a frail ego into an ironist, literature into sociology, and daily reflections into savoir mourir. Today, I know this could be a most natural itinerary.

To those who never read Canetti, I have nothing to say. It is not the kind of writer one can successfully recommend. To some, his reflections may seem fractured and bizarre, his autobiographical writings even less readable than Kafka’s, and his novel, Auto-Da-Fé, simply too thick, too theatrical, too superfluous,  too static. Canetti is a take-it-or-leave-it author. And so are all the others that rule my foggy little world.

PS: I will be always taking the “Starman” …

The hospital’s hallways: a catwalk for death.

The health has become the central human adventure, anxiogenic and euphorigenic alike.

Prophetic voices within the medical world say that the future of the medical practice is the ecosystemic health (health as a physical, political, cultural, moral, spiritual, social and economic well-being).

Now, both patients and doctors have to subscribe to such dilatation up to non-recognition of the concept of health. This health will always be something yet to be conquered. It’s something that involves a systematic approach of all factors that have (or could have) an influence upon our physical and psychological comfort. Could you imagine anything larger? No. The health is larger than life.

Therefore, the desideratum of health is, just like, say, the desideratum of holiness, something of a melancholic intangibility. The vocation of being healthy, just like the vocation of being a saint, must be something coming as an – commonly unexplainable – gift of grace. However, in both cases, the effort does count. The dexterity of leading a healthy life, just like the ascetic dexterity, could be practiced , of course, only to a certain extent, through sober diets, spiritual hygiene, frugal lifestyle, and superhuman patience. And how many saints have you seen lately? Well, you certainly ain’t gonna see more healthy people… Both these paths (leading to immortality) are blocked. We should come up with something else because the theoretical universe of medicine is infinite and thanatocentric.

The ideology of healthy life is written with hypocholesterolic blood in this Book of the Books which is the corpus of the modern medicine: the most elitist, the most “kabbalistic” and the most “impossible” book ever written. This “book” is the saga of modernity, this book can gather within its pages all the fundamental worries and all the fundamental ideas ever born within an epoch, every single spasm of our hearts wrapped in grease, every hard spot on our mammary glands, every serotonin fall, every norm, every verdict and every reason that draws painful lines between normality and abnormality, between forbidden and accessible, between the sacred and the profane.

The five year old kid about his girlfriend at the kindergarden: “her hair is sometimes dark brown, sometimes light brown, and she wears a butterfly vest”.

…I wonder when exactly in our life the overwhelming power of the cliché takes over and we can’t manage anymore to say anything distinctively beautiful about the one we love?

PS: No one’s even close to Rufus Wainwright when it comes to singing and songwriting. Check the live performance of In My Arms, sung with Martha.

Only turn your music player on when everything else around you has been successfully played down.

I could never have a significant musical experience without letting the contours of the world fade. “Tafelmusik” with all its myriads of contemporary variants disappoints me to tears. Music has all the required qualities to be a tremendously intense experience in itself; when associated with food and talk it becomes so much less than it is.

I take the liberty to doubt the interest for music of those who only use it as a background for other pleasant activities (like talking, walking, driving, eating, drinking, dancing, mating); it’s all about the greedy pragmatism of those who want the biggest sandwich available on the life-market: the all-in-one burger experience that just couldn’t slide down the throat without music; music as dill mayonnaise; and therefore, so many producers and songwriters have learned how to cook in order to survive in today’s entertainment industry. As long as music can make other things slide, it’s good music, it’s “yummy” music. No funfair, no Burger King!

I only believe in music that can stop the world from turning, walking, talking, eating, mating; music that make you halt, fail, starve, and die.

PS: Music like this.

People’s faces in September. Have you noticed them? Glowing, confident, impetuous faces. The extravagant summer tan is slowly fading leaving those cappuccino-coloured spots on foreheads, shoulders and necks. The eyes are back in action, there’s no more summer lust pouring down the cheeks like a hot strawberry-flavoured pudding. Behind these September sunglasses, you can guess operative looks, not salaciously dilated pupils. The mouths are talking into phones, the lips look thinner as they move faster, the smiles  look more cleverer and less cheesy, the collars are stiff, the neckline is high, the hair gets darker and the brain gets excited.

These supernatural, smooth faces walk up or down the streets, looking like heading somewhere and necessarily believing they are going to make a big difference. They feel transfigured by their future, they believe in transactions and ideal customers, they believe in transparent markets and they believe in low rents, they believe in communication and ecology, in peace,  love and understanding. They believe in all those things that seemed unbelievably funny during summer.

Heaven knows, this city has never been more optimistic and the Sun has never been so kind and so patient with all these – suddenly beautiful – faces. The Sun’s the ideal client to work with; the brightest real deal and your personal contribution to the universe. Under September sunshine, everything turned to heavy gold bars; just reach out and grab one, they’ll be all gone by Christmas.

PS: Get your teenage kicks right here. I will never stop falling in love with this song, year after year after year. So honestly-built, so cleverly-arranged, so genuinely-catchy, so impossible to recapture it in today’s writing and producing habits without sliding into the emptiest clichés…