To my male readers:

Worthless things seem to gain in value once they enter the area of a woman’s interest.

If it’s about the  lamest man alive or about a LV replica purse, women love to make the worthless seem praiseworthy and the other way around. Nothing stirs her more than making up strategies and tactics for turning cheap into dear, and gold into trash. She is the acknowledged governor of all understatements, and the crowned queen of all overstatements. She can make everything happen, in any (im)possible way; more precisely, she puts a great deal of wit and a generous piece of passion in creating and imposing a “new reality”, conformable to her wish; it doesn’t matter how striking the dissimilarity between the PR product and the genuine object is, she’ll make every effort to enforce her truth on the most skeptical people. Her determination  is both perplexive and pathetic, pueril and perfidious, and, above all, frightfully efficient. Sadly, even often than assumed, the whole world ends up believing in what she believes in. For a moment, nothing seems more comfortable then letting her talents guide your views: she gladly bends the reality until it suits your expectations.  She’ll do that for you, if she really wants to. But she’ll tear everything down and declare it null and void the minute she changes her mind, leaving you aimless, overwhelmed by contradictions.

It’s her natural condition to constantly work for you or against you; so don’t worry, or watch out. Nothing warms a mediocre man’s heart more than noticing how – if the woman wants it to be so – his mediocrity turns to sheer wisdom, right under his very eyes. Oh what a treat. Oh what a threat.

PS: A treat and a threat: Regina’s “Sailor Song”, live.

“Never give up your dreams!” is a dangerous modern edict. And, paradoxically, a humiliating ideology, an insult toward our adaptation abilities and intelligence.

No, you can’t do anything, and no, not everything’s possible. There’s nothing positive about “positive thinking”, and the idiotically positive views on “personal growth” have made more losers than winners. Optimism is not about ignoring the bad, but about acknowledging the slightest form of good that comes your way. How can you detect it if you never pay attention to reality? And how can you pay attention (and respect) to what is yet to come if you’re too busy refining your dreaming skills, building up on air? There must be so many cowards hiding behind their dreams…

A life full of dreams is just as full and just as empty as a newly-freed hotel room: thousands and thousands of absences floating around, filling the corners, thrilling the bed sheets. Everyone‘s in there, and no one‘s to be found.

A most beautiful dream is no more than a very absence. The more extensively dreamt, the more absent and pressing will get. Till it’ll swallow you in. It’s no longer you who work on a dream, it’s gonna be the dream working on you, haunting your rooms, switching your lights off, sucking your powers, turning you into a zombie ready to throw himself out of the window for the sake of his master.

There’s no higher “savoir-faire” than managing your ideals, that is, knowing when and how to give up your dream for saving your reality. For a start, don’t check in a double room, if single. It will only double the absence.

PS: Have you seen it? Have you heard it? Do you know her? Do you like her? You should, you definitely should. Cat Power, “I Lost Someone”, performed live.

For obscure reasons, I couldn’t log in the blog (and mail) account until today. I apologize to all of you who didn’t get their comments published. I hope the privilege of accessing my own account is not going to be taken away too soon.

I’ll try to get back with a post once I write one. Till then, it’s worth knowing that not even God can fight the spring. I strongly advice you to give in, get out, and take a walk…

PS: …on the wild side.

You can fix this in minutes. It looks great and it tastes divinely. All you need is a wok and a some handy ingredients: rice noodles, baby veal, soy sauce, sherry/wine, rice vinegar, brown sugar, one hot/sweet red pepper, carrots, ginger, green onions, green garlic, broccoli and one big avocado. It may sound like improvising on a Thai-theme. True, this is sheer improvisation. But who cares anyway as long as it makes a perfectly balanced dinner for hungry, tired, late-comers home?

Cooking your own meals is either a “devalued” habit (why lose precious time? why not eating out instead? why not calling for pizza emergency?) or an ideology (live awarely, eat better for less money, keep your budget under control, cooking is trendy etc.) Both extremes are, in my opinion, ridiculous. It only goes to show the terrifying void in our homely lives, as if no genuine  and spontaneous approach of indoor time would be possible anymore.

Cooking is a highly-social activity, and everyone who cooks knows it. Cooking can be a “chaos regulator” because it codifies and circumscribes interactions. Cooking space can be a focal point where people  simply reconnect to each other. Cooking can be an inner attitude generating cozy homely feelings. Cooking can just as well be a creative impulse. Or a cheap self-gratificatory gesture. Cooking can be all these and more, but never a gratuitous or sterile activity.

To put it shortly, cooking makes your home the place to be. Don’t you think it’s upsetting to actually have to leave your house whenever you have the desire to eat well? Or don’t you think it’s pathetic to “have to” vegetate in front of the TV/computer with a pizza at hand, ignoring everyone, including yourself? I somehow suspect that people’s (vehement) reasons for rejecting cooking are  subtle indicators of their inner misery and confusion.

PS: I’ve always admired Elvis Costello. He did it all, and he did it well. I’ve been, at times, irritated by his prodigious career as a songwriter: how many different songs can one write out of three chords without becoming ridiculously redundant? The answer is: a lot more than I could ever imagine. Here’s one overwhelming proof: “When I Was Cruel 2″. Can anyone get any smarter than this?

I’ve started this painting weeks ago, but I never seem to have the time to finish it and only God knows when I actually will. It’s sad in a way. It’s sad because it shows my inability to prioritize art over other projects. When I paint, I live for a moment in/with the illusion of being a painter, but then I realize it’s just a sweet concession I make to myself and, from time to time, a corrective existential gesture: a way to supervise, to neutralize or to penalize my daily working routine.

PS: Mindblowing performance of Small Faces’ “Tin Soldier”. Great vocals coming, as usual, from Steve Marriott. Why was he so underrated as a singer/songwriter??

This morning, I found a quote (from whom?) in Pavese’s The Business of Living that I immediately knew it was true: “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion“.

Strangeness in the proportion is, I believe, the most consistent and intriguing type of “abnormality”, but also the most stirring token of beauty. Surely, this is a typical modern paradox, you might think, since everybody knows that classic beauty is all about the proportion of parts. True. I’ve read enough about  the Greek golden ratio, Da Vinci’s golden proportion and the need for psychological redundancy in perceiving art, but I’ve also heard so many (modern) people expressing their disappointment when seeing the expectable (because perfectly regulated) face of Mona Lisa.

We love the obstacles that stand in the way of what we could later call a beautiful wholeness. It’s not about parts that are “bizarre” in their own right, it’s the relations between parts containing something “bizarre”, something of an enigma,  an “otherwise effect”; an “otherwise effect” as such is susceptible of being called into question and, later on, being labeled as “beautiful” or being dismissed as “awful”. There is, I believe, a fine line between “beauty” and “ugly”, “beauty” and “kitsch”, “beauty” and “freaky” nowadays, that easily turns into plain superposition. That’s why, I think, art has become “uncomfortable” and “uneasy” for both the artist and the art analyst. And that’s why, I think, you never quite know what to do with it. You never really see when “beautiful” is “truly beautiful” (not that you’d care for that these days),  you never really know when enough is enough.

In the iPod: The new U2 album is the best thing they’ve done in years. I’ve never been a fan of them, in fact, to be honest, I accumulated hatred and some sort of resentment for their undisputable success. As their carrier expended, so did – in my opinion – the gratuity of their fame. To call “The One” the best love song ever written (as many reviewers claimed), to applaud Bono’s cosmical ego and his engaged/paranoid attitude towards the world, to look high at his goodness and grace and music was a little bit too much for me to put up with. I think pop music should be a lot less (and a lot more) than this. More precisely, it requires a certain modesty of goals in order to reach a lot higher. However, one thing related to U2 could never be denied: their professionalism (Edge’s creative abilities play an important role here). And No Line On The Horizon is wonderfully crafted, bringing the high and the low, the transcendence and the vice, the easy and the complex together. It makes you actually believe that rock ‘n roll is a cryptic saga about human nature. To my own surprise, I, for the first time, enjoyed that. I like the single “Get On Your Boots”, and I hate the album closer “The Cedars of Lebanon” which I was supposed to love since it has indeed the best lyrics I’ve heard recently, and a thoughtful guitar part. The most balanced song on the album must be “Stand Up Comedy”, and the most interesting one could be “Moments of Surrender”.