Like a Sundance Kid behind a synthesizer

There are moments when you reach a sort of new awareness. Like that time around 4 AM when you enjoy the sublime condition of holistic comprehension and logorrhea just five or ten minutes before getting involved in some limerick brawling or throwing up in the toilets (if you’re lucky enough).

So, when this blog started, your favourite english man was just cheerfully pleased with his brand new attainment. But there came the hardnesses of managing all the new functionings and capabilities. It took a lot of walking, of ear-bleeding music, arduous-reading books, watching of the girls go by – but, surprisingly enough, not much boozing – to find some strength and write some streams of ink in a paper.

Lately, Foucault have met Sartre in the centre of my mind, and the two of them brats are still arguing, with Michel’s wit slightly overstretching JP’s severity; while anarchism, indepententism and food democracy issues are floating around them; and Arctic Monkeys just released a new single, but I can’t wait to hear how Tenco’s voice sounds like on a vinyl.

Feeling like a Sundance Kid behind a synthesizer: or Having an awesome device in your hands and not knowing what to do. Any ideas?

Wind – the customer you have called is unavailable at the moment.

This I suppose to be the best song to suit these days in Macomer. Even if we managed to get around it finally. But sorry guys, you won’t get no new post today: apparently, you can’t go to sleep at 7 am and be fresh and smart like any other day. Not if you’re twentyseven years old, and displaced and blah blah blah.

So this could be the right day to think about all of this, which is not pretty much indeed. But it can stimulate deeper thoughts, about language, identity, meaning of life. You can pet your hound dog and think about those days when everything was so dreamy and fun: when you could eat strawberries too, as said in a traditional italian folk song.

This is really not much, I admit. But who am I, the United Nations? Just take pen and paper and write something smart by yourself.

Let me know.

Have a nice day.

Epiphany with Sartre

“The concrete situation of the conscience of the world must in any time serve as a singular motivation to the establishment of the unreal”. Good shot, Mr Sartre, my newly-met mate. Although rather elitist, this is one of the “it-changed-my-life” quotes that, personally, I can still recall by heart whenever I want to flirt with myself. You know, that kind of things that make you feel witty and charming.

By the way we are not here to talk about one’s love for oneself. That quote is a brilliant spark to every rebel who’s not interested in building up his/her career in professional politics – for this purpose, you should probably check handbooks by italian leftoid politicians, who have the best experience in losing battles without even setting the goal of their war (this can be a wonderful example that my sardinian mates will understand). But for us few, happy few anarchist dreamers, incoherent, rambling, wanna-be-che-guevara anarchist dreamers, a handbook of just a sentence can be enough. No need to praise the author (as much rambling and so on as us), no schemes, rules, initiation rituals: just learn to be a free thinker. As Ali Shari’ati (which is a sort of muslim existentialist; Sartre is said to have declared once “I have no religion, but if I had one, it would be that of Shari’ati”) says, “the free thinker’s functions are to remove the contradictions and discrepancies that exist in the heart of a society and enter them into the feeling and consciousness of the society. As long as such contradictions exist in objectivity they will not cause any movement.” That is precisely the root of the problem: we will never, and I know it can sound banal, be able to revolt this system since we are not strong and brave enough to nullify it, to deny its very deep assumptions by delving steadily into the morbid of its contradictions.

In history, many attempts have been made in this direction: monotheistic religions and rebel ideologies (which are so similar to each other) tried to subverse society by giving colourful and deep poetic meaning to the rationale of this revolt. It always ended in nothing, with religion selling itself to the powerful, and socialism settling down to compete peacefully and meaninglessly. But this is not a good reason not to try.

And by the way, again, so many people have gained their wealthy career by eruditely commenting such words as those of Sartre, but as they were dead speeches of an old tribunus plebis.

So, my dear glass comrades (as Sardinian people refer to the ones who drink with them – and I suppose you are that kind of people), I just won’t say more about this. Just stick that sentence in your mind, repeat it while you are stuck in the traffic jam, say it loud at night when you are going home after hanging out, and after all of this.. Just act.

And, yes, probably luddism is not a bad idea.

P.S. Today it’s Epiphany, or Befana in italian. What the hell is this holiday about? I don’t think I will ever understand.

What it’s like to be me? (trad. Cosa è come essere me?)

My name is Paolo, but you can call me Paul. Paul Star would be my English name, which is in fact my real name, because I am the product of a secret experiment by some anarchist scientists. They created me from some random shiny stem cells, and made me get birth in an sort of box island right in the center of the Mediterranean sea, just for the sake of it (anarchists can be very funny sometimes). So I am a displaced, stateless man, living in this weird place called Sardinia, and it took years for me to understand my very origin was.. basically none.

Clues were not easy to be caught. I must admit my creators were clever enough to drop me in the most anonymous town here, a place called Macomer, where a strange alchemy of internal and external immigrants made the identity of the town sort of fade away, as if someone poured cold water in a glass of black wine. You can still feel the flavor and maybe get drunk with it if you really want to, but mostly the result is a pointless drink. So, in such a place, it’s very hard to find yourself displaced as I seem to be.

But something went wrong with the experiment. That was the day when George Best, a fellow comrade of those crazy scientists, went down in the laboratory for some booze. And you know, after some drinks people started to totter, and sway with glasses in their hands: so imperceptible drops of gin and whisky, mixed with very britannic sweat, fell into my home test tube, giving to me an ineffable sense of nostalgia, a real homesickness for the british islands.

That finally explains my above-average brilliancy in speaking english (which is not so easy to find in a person who has never been in England), my easiness with cold weather and cold people, and that melancholy feeling when I am at the bar and I dream about a wooden pub with potentially serial killers all together singing “There she goes” by the La’s.

Now I won’t tell you lies, I like the life I am living here. I always get a smile when I think about its weirdness and absurdity, and I am afraid that, when I will finally manage to visit my supposed homeland, it will be no way like I daydream about it.

I must never forget, though, that I am an experiment, and since my demiurges have vanished, or are maybe hidden somewhere observing me – which could mean that they realized the booze error and maybe created another person, in that case I hope to meet him or her (hopefully her) someday – I must find out my goal in life alone. So I will start reporting here what it’s like to be me, displaced in a displaced town, with my italian english – it’s like normal english, but full of gestures and strange sounds, seasoned with the orgasmic urgency of speaking in such a language and gagging to appear brilliant, in the end a very latin way to play the englishman: I find that it’s funnier to talk like this rather than using a quasi-native language that would appear everything but endearing.

So, my dear 25 readers, this is the end of my introduction to myself. As to appear classy, I will tie up with lines of a great French poet (I know how english people feel a sort of hate/love for those frog-eating people living on the other side of the Channel):

L’univers-solitude

Derrière moi mes yeux se sont fermés

La lumière est brûlée la nuit décapitée

Des oiseaux plus grands que les vents

Ne savent plus où se poser.

Dans les tourments infirmes dans les rides des rires

Je ne cherche plus mon semblable

La vie s’est affaissée mes images sont sourdes

Tous les refus du monde ont dit leur dernier mot

Ils ne se rencontrent plus ils s’ignorent

Je suis seul je suis seul tout seul

Je n’ai jamais changé.

(P. Éluard)