…on a banal topic:

The  holy Facebook or the recently sanctified microblogging platform Twitter (why would anyone want to seriously answer the question “what are you doing now?”  anyway?) have become a lot more than “social media”. They have become a mentality summing up the micro-capabilities, micro-doings, and micro-attitudes of our micro-selves.

The micro-consequences of twittering are, of course, minor, therefore safe. Such platforms, designed  for (public!) brief messages and (public!) quick interactions, mean nothing intellectually or emotionally for those who use them. Frankly speaking, twittering your life is no more valuable than scratching your head. However, almost every living soul has a Twitter/Facebook account of which one is proud; and,  as I’ve  been told by a social media specialist, emailing and blogging are gradually given up for twittering and facebooking.

What has become of the writing and of the reading within such platforms is hard to say without sounding too preachy or too paranoid. I myself have given up apocalyptic views on (internet) life of the future.  We shouldn’t underestimate people’s need for meanings and for reliable, articulated information, and we shouldn’t ignore their ability to produce it/obtain it in various, unpredictable ways. On the other hand, we should face the fact that recent social media have become the most significant emblem of degraded communication. They promote, among others, an abstinence from meaning, and an orgy of  futile attempts to “keep in touch” with everybody – which is, as we all know it by now, a serious setback for significant  interaction.

Nonetheless, Twitter and Facebook have always striken me as serene  (thought-free) places full of little lies, little nothings, lovely gadgets, witty tutorials, quizzes and polls that keep you excitingly busy  all day long . But what’s even more exciting is that you can track one’s life in real time. The 1-sentence-answers to the  question “What are you doing now?” written in different moments of the day have become one’s absolute existential landmarks – something worth to be written, and worth to be followed: one’s precious micro-life. Which is all we are left with anyway.

The aged’s affinities with wisdom and serenity have become, I think, problematic. Growing old has to do, at most, either with false hopes or  with resentment. Some aged people seem to be perfectly equipped for the first, some others seem to be perfectly equipped for the latter. But most of the times the old grow older in ambiguous ways.

Roughly put, the old age rests upon three sources of ambiguity: the waste, the chill, and the absence.

The waste is, in every respect, enormous. Illnesses wasting the body, nostalgia wasting the heart, those long, empty hours wasting the will and turning it into something arbitrary and dispensable. When neither the gain nor the loss makes sense, everything’s a waste.

The old body warms up slower and chills down quicker. The shivering is its second nature. It’s the closest answer to life, and the grossest hint to death. Growing old as growing cold…

As the world deflates becoming no more than a ghost army of forgotten names, the absence expands. It unfolds itself like a blooming, inodorous, dark flower; first obstructing the corners of the room, then covering empty chairs and dusty tables, shrouding faces and genealogies, and finally congesting the nostrils of the soul. The moment when an old soul is no longer able to breath in hopes and exhale promises, the absence comes to life for real, turning from an insidious velvet flower into a beast: the shocking angel. Just like Jacob upon his return to Canaan, the old man struggles with The Absence itself, with the solid, dashing absence of everything he used to be, of everything that’s growing out of his reach.

But there’s no way for him to see “the face” of this Absence (his Absence) and live. He either lives on in a sanctuary of illusions, hallucinating by the edge of reality, or he dies. The moment he chooses to live sanely, the ambiguity creeps in. “Who am I?” Who is he, who won the battle with his own Absence? “Who am I?” Who is he, who trips on his shoelaces, drops the tea cup, and stumbles in everyday recollection? “Who am I?” Who is he, who has no social legitimation to be alive, and no existential justification to function socially? “Who am I to be?“

The old is ontologically distinct from the young. And nothing can fill up the gap between that which is ontologically desirable (because socially triumphant), and that which is ontologically a waste (because socially absent). The young is gold, the old is cold.

PS: I couldn’t think of anything warmer than Cohen’s “A Thousand Kisses Deep”, recitation, live.

PS2: See above another piece from a series of drawings I’ve made a month ago.

PS3: I apologize for the long absence and for all the unpublished commentaries that are unfortunately gone. I  had to put up with a serious data crash. And the spam is killing me!

It’s not the first time when I expose myself as an ecstatic admirer of Leon Wieseltier’s writing(s). If you read, for instance, this article, you’ll understand why.

It’s not the style alone that gives his writings an absolute sense of reflectively grounded thinking, it’s of course his views that count. It’s the way he takes position on all those vital questions that make some hypocrites frown, some fools laugh, and most of us yawn. His accurate sensitivity to “the essential”, the way he demarcates it without limiting it, resembles the gentle, elegant approach of infinity by a top mathematician.

Some say his articles are too erudite and too preciously written for actually being precious. I’d say  instead that Wieseltier’s writings have the density of the human nature itself. Which is not to be mistaken with impenetrability. Unlike most of the treatises, political analyses, reviews and essays available on today’s (way too google-able) cultural market, his texts make perfect sense. They are everything but confuse. Everything but redundant. Everything but illogical. Everything but futile. Everything but obsolete. Everything but moronic. Besides, they have a  – nowadays  – unusual effect on the reader: they actually make him or her think along. In our reading routine, I dare say, thinking has more and more become either an accident, or, worse, a sort of “distinct tool” especially designed for entering a “distinct field”: radical critique. If it is to think, better think deconstructively.

But well, it’s not that easy “to deconstruct” a statement about nostalgia as a memory-kitsch. Most of Wieseltier’s statements are fresh reasonings on old truths and viceversa. There’s a timeless premise in the most perishable piece of news, and there’s a newsworthy effect or a commonsensical pertinence in a most exclusive (erudit) reference. He proves it all brilliantly.

I wish I could name a second best contemporary essayer, but I can’t. Ignorance,  laziness, imposture, stylistic inability, foolish lamentations, awkwardness, arrogant independence from the “old truths”, and pitiful logic are chocking most of the posts/articles I get to read everyday. I look up to Wieseltier’s wise texts on a daily basis. I don’t know why, but it’s like they’re not gonna wait forever.

PS: Here’s one of my favorite pieces of music. I’d like to answer in advance to all those who are going to say it’s crap: “yes, but it’s fascinatingly genuine and genuinely fascinating crap”. So enjoy it accordingly.

I’m afraid of artists. I don’t get them. And they don’t get me.  We are different, me and them. They call me “analytical” and they call me “boring” whenever they get their chance to do so. I call them “flimsy” and I call them “dull” whenever I get my chance to do so. They are annoyed by my hesitation to “play” and “be free”, I am annoyed by their disdain for wisdom and by their slavish devotion to their own caprices. They most likely think I’m heartless.

I’m afraid of scholars too. I can’t be with them. An they can’t be with me. We are different, me and them. They call me “subjective” and they call me “extravagant”. For my part, I call them “non-reflective” and I call them “ghostly businessmen”. They are easily irritated by my “need of meanings” and by my “illegitimate sophistries”, while I get extremely disturbed by their “grant-driven interests”, and by their “lack of courage” to involve in their thinking concepts and reasons from other fields than their own. They most likely think I’m crazy.

As for the common people outside my window, we don’t get along at all, me and them. Passers-by and neighbors are extremely good at spotting social vulnerabilities. My downstairs neighbor for instance is not  to be fooled. If you blinked in the wrong moment, you lose. I blinked once, he won’t be saying hello ever again.

But apart from that, all is well. ‘Cause no part is a whole and no man is a world. One finds little lonely pleasures in little lonely times. Feel free to fill in the blank between this “hi” and that “hello” with whatever thing you never thought would work. Because it will work. The more obscure one’s reasons for happiness, the surer its persistence. Have a splendid week.

According to my – fairly unrealistic approach of life – guests should always be served a warm dinner (or meal).  That’s a bit of a trouble, even in my best days of cooking.  Firstly, you are not allowed to shower  and change your clothes before your guests arrive because you can’t afford to spoil the timing of your cooking this and of your cooking that, of your calling here and of your calling there (that is, making sure you find out whether they got stuck in traffic; if yes,  which is often the case in this monster city, making sure you know for how long).

Secondly, as I have an open kitchen, cooking, baking and boiling with the guests around the table is not an option; doesn’t matter how hard you try to keep everything under control, to pay attention to what they say, to avoid putting different ingredients on the table among plates and glasses, at some point the bubble will break and they’ll hear you cursing, they’ll see you burning something or burning yourself, breaking a mug or sweating like a racing horse. Even if the guests are your best friends (or precisely because of that), you don’t want any of these to happen. So you prefer gambling with time, hoping they’ll knock at your door precisely when you’ve turned off the cooking stove and you’ve mopped the floor for the last time.

I’ve never considered sushi to be best for guests, till recently. I always thought sushi is, just like pizza, more like a family dinner, something to eat in front of the TV. However, I’ve recently made up my mind. If you want to welcome your guests in a relaxed mood, sushi is the answer. You fix it in the morning, you store  everything in the fridge, and you put it on the table 15 minutes after the guests’ arrival. If you add, for variation, a shrimp salad (also fixed in the morning), some roe and different sorts of dipping sauces (all home made!! don’t just squeeze plastic bottled soy/mayonnaise-based sauces into bowls! that’s… gross), and, of course, some rice noodles and vegetables (red cabbage stands out!) – you’ll have a complete dinner and a wonderfully-colored table.

I like to spice up the soy sauce with some genuine cayenne pepper, a bit of finely chopped garlic, and two or three bits of fresh ginger. If you leave it in the fridge for about 3 hours the aromas will blend together and you’ll have the perfect dip for sushi which, by the way, is best eaten with hands, not with chop sticks.

Since not everybody’s fond of raw fish, make sure you make some maki sushi (using nori)  filled with boiled tuna, because the nigiri way won’t let you use cooked fish. As for the raw salmon, make sure is fresh! I am lucky enough to live nearby a  fish store that  brings fresh fish every day and slices it in front of you. If you don’t know if your fish is fresh (as a rule, don’t take the seller’s word for granted…) and, moreover, if the shrimps eyes are clouded, stay away from them. Try some frozen shrimps instead, but not the pre-boiled  ones because they have already lost their taste.

Also, better peel and devein the shrimps yourself so that you know what you’ll be eating. I use to boil the freshly peeled (and never frozen) shrimps for 1 or 2 minutes in water and soy sauce, then I let them cool before using them in the salad.

Since I hate beer (and sake), no one will ever get it in my house. A well-chilled extra dry white wine is always at hand though. And it goes well with the fish. Do I hear a knock at the door?

I believe in ignorance, ineptitude and imbecility, but I don’t believe in innocence. Innocence is a luxurious state (of mind?) I no longer afford to approach innocently.

The prestige of innocence needs no further explanation or justification: it has always been intact; even today, in the toughest times of moral values. The lack of knowledge of evil is one of the most visited topoi in religion and idealistic political/social schemes. And currently, one of the most appealing answers to the problem of child raising and marital infidelity: “He didn’t know what he was doing, he was just exploring the world and lost his way for a moment”. Yeah right. Or, better said, *yawn* (as I’ve learned from some readers of this blog that this *yawn* is a way to express one’s aggressive boredom).

Indeed, the “worst” thing about innocence is its being unable to question its own worth, or to justify its own merits, and  then to use them as alibi. Once an innocent person claims his or her innocence, he or she becomes, in no time at all, an imposter. Innocence does not and should not work as a firewall. Innocence is not a “value”  intended for practical men.  Innocence belongs to “another” world that still pays respect to meaning and otherworldly models. Otherwise it’s not only superfluous, but also highly annoying.

I remember I once blogged about how deplorable fake innocence is (especially in women who still believe it’s the ultimate seduction weapon). And I also remember I once said that even the fools are guilty. But what am I doing here? Do I want you to acknowledge your guilt, your being “stained” by the original sin? Not at all. I have no idea how many Calvinists are still active on today’s religious market and I am not planning to gather any further information on this particular topic. I just want to defend the right of being guilty as a practical and honest solution for getting by in an anxiety-driven world.

A distinctive guilt that is reasonably dealt with, is nowhere near innocence, but it’s oh so much worthier than invoking or exercising your “innocent inputs” into an unidealistic system. Don’t make it worse than it already is. Under utilitarian circumstances, just don’t be so indecent to play the innocent. If you let it be, then let it be guilty.

PS: New canvas above called “The Storm” (120/120 cm). It took me a week to finish it.

IN THE iPOD: A Camp‘s new album, Colonia. Hm. This is a tough one. I don’t know how to put it. It’s a good album in many ways, but it also has a kind of…indecently sophisticated side that makes it slightly irritating.  I think it has an overdone, artificial simplicity that, to some extent, compromises both the music and the lyrics.

I’ve read lots of reviews. All of them were at least good. Critics love this second album of Nina Persson’s solo project. I even suspect they actually live for reviewing such pseudo-sophisticated pop works. Unlike some of the Cardigans albums, this one is more comprehensive and coherent, but significantly less catchy. I would say that Colonia is, in part, desfigured by some kind of wisdom that simply doesn’t work in the pop world. Cleverness, yes, that’s a good ingredient, but wisdom is boring. And this album is full of sophisms, introspections, and classic chords. It’s a perfect attitudinizer.

“Stronger than Jesus”, the first single, is an example of such ridiculous musical and human overstatement. It deals with a “vital issue”: “Don’t you know that love is stronger than Jesus? Don’t you know that love can kill anyone?”. It’s at the same time dull, pathetic, and far too elaborated. Having these unfortunate features and a poor melody, everything becomes more of an understatement and less of a single: the song degrades itself with every listening. The same happened with the other ones. I used to like “Golden Teeth and Silver Medals”, but this seemingly beautiful and plain song faded too after a couple of listenings.

The best thing about the album is its homogeneity and its overall feel of completeness. The worst thing is its mechanical structure, its wise (but not really that wise after all) lyrics that make it somehow precious and inefficient. I once said about Regina Spektor that she’s too smart for writing good pop music and I still maintain my affirmation. To some extent, it applies to Nina Persson as well. Her reflexive approach  of music takes away the freshness and the spontaneity of the pop song she might have otherwise succeeded in writing. Take Tori Amos for instance. She is the perfect blend between musical instinct and purposeful writing. But I’ll leave that for some other time. For now, I just want to say that “It’s Not Easy To Be Human” from A Camp‘s Colonia might be the worst song I’ve heard in months.

I thought of doing something nobody would expect of me: blogging – once in a while – about food under the label “culinary digressions”.

I care dearly about food, and I care dearly about cooking it. To me, it is a matter of ego, artistry, and old-fashioned hostess instinct. This “care” of mine is, like all the other “cares” I have, a very complicated one; it involves (precious) time, (considerable) social, emotional and financial resources, aesthetics, green policies, tears, sweat, smelly steam invading the flat,  innumerable (yet never sufficient) kitchen kits, a tough cook apron, and a lot of (not easily breakable) confidence.

I try to cook as intuitively as possible. A friend of mine once asked how come I never read the recipe once I start cooking. Do I really have to learn the recipe by heart? No, not at all, I answered. It is just that I  never start cooking without making sure I understood the recipe. While reading it, I imagine the outcome, I instill its “laws”, I make sense out of it all. The shortest way to a catastrophic culinary outcome is reading one row at a time without trying to understand your present cooking manoeuvres as being part of a whole procedure that is supposed to have a certain (recognizable and tasty) result.

Whenever you think that nothing looks more dissonant and less intuitive than the recipe in front of you, whenever you fear all those ingredients crowded on your table are going to fade, melt or turn blue, and whenever you realize that someone trained to become a dadaist poet printed some chaotic words and numbers in your cookbook, it’s time to step back: bring all those “primordial” elements of reality together in your mind and thus provoke the vision of the upcoming dish! Once the recipe makes sense in your mind and you can actually connect the words on the page with the ingredients on the table, close the cookbook and follow your instincts. They can’t fail you.

Yesterday evening I cooked an…ostrich meat-based dish, for the first time in my life. It was a strange experience. The color of the meat makes you think it’s veal, but because its being very rich in iron,  the color is really very intensely red. I’ve decided to make it the thai-way and I’ve learned just in time that, unlike veal, the ostrich meat does not have to be marinated for too long because it is a lot leaner. Rice vinegar, soy sauce (not  the salty one!), red onion, honey, chili cayenne, fresh ginger, and some sherry made a perfect marinate for the meat. I kept everything in the fridge for about 1 hour (I usually marinate the veal for 3 to 4 hours), while the brown rice was cooked (brown rice does smell like sweaty socks while being cooked, but tastes and feels a lot better than the white one! Don’t pass it by when you see it in your grocery store!). Once marinated, I cooked everything in the wok for no more than 5 minutes (ostrich meat becomes hard if overcooked). Vegetables (broccoli, carrots and spinach) steamed for about 5 minutes accompanied the meat and made a complete, extremely healthy dish. The meat tastes a bit like pork and a bit like veal, but I won’t lie to you, it does have a peculiar, faint aftertaste that made me think, for a moment, of the smell in the dissection room of the Medical School I once used to go to.

As a starter, I fixed one of my absolute favorite dishes (although, in my opinion, French cuisine is nothing to die for): chèvre chaud. Make sure the goat cheese is not too hard and not too soft, not to salty and not too sweet, and, also, I dare say, the organic rye bread is a must because it tastes better than other sorts of bread when grilled. I never skip the Dijon mustard and roughly sliced avocado when I cook this salad, but I never use bacon or eggs or any  other kind of “heavy” ingredients. This is definitely not the kind of dish you want to overdue. It’s a discrete, slightly elegant appetizer that goes extremely well with a French floral white wine. The only distinctive taste must come from the grilled goat cheese and from one green onion finely chopped. Because I think lettuce leaves have no taste and no personality, I try to use spinach as often as possible (leaves must be well-dried after being washed. The excess of water makes everything mushy and the salad would look and taste lifeless.)

All in all, the dinner was great. The cooking time has been understimated though (fixing a salad always takes more time than expected) and we set the table sometime around 10 p.m. which I think it’s intolerable. Staying up for 4 more hours afterwards with a bottle of Chianti at hand was a graceful idea though.

The sun is out this Sunday. It’s a fine first day of spring, with very little street noise, kids and dogs playing quietly among the blocks, men carrying flowers, sparrows carrying some bread up an oak-tree, women in  tights proudly carrying themselves. One shouldn’t write about such perfectly designed first days of spring because it’s annoying to the reader. And humiliating to the writer. It’s like wanting to make good photography  by taking pictures of a perfect beach in Mauritius. Or, worse, like wanting to make it big in the art world by painting a mermaid with shiny tail and huge breasts (yes, I’ve seen that a week ago in a gallery, priced at 20.000 euros – a real bargain!).

Therefore, I have no desire to write about the 1st day of March. I’ll leave it to each of you to experience, despise, treasure or overlook its practical and symbolic merits. I just want to tell you more about one of my most serious mental exercises. I want to understand one thing: how on earth can people be psychologically and socially “fulfilled” while not taking ANY time to focus on their own thoughts, and without  practicing ANY delay between speech and action? I genuinely fail to understand how they function.

Each day, they do n+1 things, they post n+1 texts in their blogs, they eat n+1 lunches with n+1 friends, they train n+1 times per week, they write n+1 studies on the same bibliography, they  know n+1 “cool places” in town, and have pets, kids and much more. They actually live up to the most unachievable standards of modernity. They keep up with everything, while I can’t even keep up with my poor self.

I meet these people everyday. They often sit down and sip their wine and their coffee. They look like chatting, catching up, taking their time. But they are people with the haste in their eyes. They can’t follow your story and they can’t find the words to tell you theirs. They proudly declare themselves “impatient” and “busy”, but their short attention span has to do with an aggressive indifference towards any kind of reflexive engagement (which has become nothing but a repulsive sign of “pretentiousness”).

The darkest (and also the most paradoxical!) side of efficiency is its deficient approach of reality. lf one wants to be efficient, one is required to disregard every aspect of reality that can’t be treated efficiently.  But hey, look, I can see the dusk from my window!

The 1st day of March 2009 is slowly fading away and I’m here at my desk, in plain contradiction with myself – contemplating a sunset I can’t write about, and writing a  committable text I can’t live up to.

PS: I agree with The White Stripes: “Truth Doesn’t Make A Noise”. This is my favourite piece of music starting with yesterday night, when we had lovely, patient people over.