Howth Castle & Environs

echo & bounce

2008-03-27T18:07:00.003Z

you could die just the same on a sunny day.
that's joyce, not me. the story so far is a little bit weird and i don't want to blabbering about a twisted stuff, made of total paranoia, low quality music, grey sky, thin rain.
so, what happened? you suddenly realize that it is normal to be worried about the future your job love friendship politics. a sunny day pops up, you can finally smell the spring and you don't care.
it's all about priority in life, you just have to be conscious of what or who makes you feel good and take the best of it.
don't be lazy, focus.
but at the same time the best you can do is to not force the events, leaving them flowing across of you, without wasting time. eyes wide open, on your environment. on the new friends. on the old ones. but the true ones.
when i woke up this morning i felt so bad. frustration, no perspective, fear. then something changed. maybe the music in my mind, a freaky soundtrack by beastie boys and fugazi, bjork and propellerheads, pixies and supergrass.

i can't really say i'm back, but at least let's try.

quando.

2008-02-22T10:29:00.003Z

quando finisce una storia. quando non hai la forza di essere di triste. quando sei solo molto stanco. quando la cameriera del ninkasi si ricorda qual è la tua birra preferita e te la spilla con un sorriso. quando vedi un film in lingua originale. quando realizzi che non te ne frega un cazzo. quando ascolti dear can e ti sembra di essere nella barcellona di 2 anni fa. quando sei felice anche se dovresti essere depresso. quando la bocca ti prende una piega amara. quando sei triste per davvero. quando il capo ti dice che hai fatto un ottimo lavoro. quando ti prendi 4 giorni di ferie per andare a sentire l'inferno progressivo e mike patton. quando hai voglia di prenderti una sbronza tutte le sere. quando guardi qualcuno negli occhi. quando riesci a tenere 4 conversazioni in 4 lingue diverse, un po' ubriaco, in un pub di rue sainte catherine. quando ti viene da dire tambien anziché aussi. quando ti viene da dire toujours anziché always. quando il fatto di aver annullato il contratto della casa alla fine si risolve in 2 compagni di appartamento simpaticissimi. quando fai una crostata e disegni una faccina sorridente con la pastafrolla. quando lei ti dice che non è più innamorata e tu lo sapevi già da tempo. quando liz si affaccia alla porta e ti chiede se ti va una pausa caffé. quando avresti voglia di ricominciare a scrivere. quando giri la città in bicicletta tutto il tempo e ti ricordi di quando avevi 12 anni. quando vai a berti una birra con elettra dopo la lezione di spagnolo e tutte le cazzo di volte dici però niente patatine e invece sul tavolo ne appare une assiette moyenne. quando scopri un nuovo posto dove bevi vino rosso e mettono i pixies di sottofondo. quando hai un nodo in gola ma in realtà non sai neanche cosa pensare. quando uno dei tuoi migliori amici ti dice che ha mollato la sua ragazza dopo 9 anni e che ora sta uscendo con un ragazzo di 21 anni. quando marion ti fa trovare in cucina i muffin al cioccolato con un biglietto che ti augura buona giornata. quando hai un sacco di persone che si sono fatte in quindici per te nei momenti difficili. quando hai comunque un posto dove stare. quando tuo padre si mette con successo a far teatro. quando tua madre fa dei corsi di lingue. quando sofia e giorgio ridono quando sentono lo zio fab al telefono. quando c'è una festa a vieux lyon. quando facciamo una cena a casa di davide e tutti portano qualcosa e di solito c'è un sacco da bere e una pasta scotta da mangiare. quando mangi al parco, guardando il rodano. quando al 6eme continente fanno un concerto pacco di musica etnica ma fai finta che ti piace lo stesso. quando ricevi una mail da dani, sommerso dalle nevi dell'illinois. quando monti un mobile dell'ikea e ti diverti come quando giocavi coi lego da piccolo. quando vai a sentire un trio jazz malato alla croix-rousse. quando mandi affanculo di nuovo l'agenzia immobiliare perché avresti potuto viverci, alla croix-rousse. quando avresti voluto fare tutto questo con una persona.

quando finisce una storia.

Un Bresciano a Lyon

2007-11-10T18:09:00.001Z

attualmente quello che mi frega è la tastiera. al lavoro c'ho la malefica azerty che una frase semplice tipo

ciao come va? ci vediamo alle 8

se non stai attento diventa

ciqo c,e vq° ci vediq,o qlle _

giuro, merda. tastiera a parte, scade oggi la mia prima settimana francese e devo dire che il bilancio è abbastanza in attivo. degne di nota parecchie persone che si sono fatte in 4 anzi in 1000 per aiutarmi e mettermi a mio agio, ed è a loro che rivolgo il mio secondo pensiero, ché il primo non si tocca mai.
ovviamente come in ogni buona avventura che si rispetti, le figure di merda non mancano, la più eclatante martedì sera, nella prima uscita ufficiale a contatto con la meglio gioventù internazionale che garbazza a lyon.

scenetta:

io: "salut!"
lei: "bonsoir!"
io: "je m'appel fabrizio"
lei: "salut!"
io: "salut!"
lei: "mais non, 'salut' c'est mon prénom!"

t-o-t-a-l-e. dopo 10 minuti di scuse mi rendo conto che si chiama sally. ma i francesi mettono sempre l'accento sull'ultima. cazzo.
di fatto è grazie a dani che la mia vita sociale è ai massimi storici. avevo conosciuto dani un paio d'anni fa, durante i miei 2 mesi catalani, ma com'è come non è all'epoca c'eravamo cagati di striscio. è stato il mio primo aggancio qui dato che lui si è trasferito 4 mesi fa, nello stesso laboratorio dove sto io giù all'ENS e probabilmente il fatto d'essere spagnolo lo mette in prima linea nelle relazioni sociali. esci un paio di volte con lui e bonosci tutto quello che c'è da conoscere sulle abitudini della meglio gioventù internazionale che garbazza a lyon.
Il lavoro non è male, si prospetta dura ma la sfangheremo anche questa volta: del resto l'inventiva non m'è mai mancata, e non voglio deludere chi ha posto fiducia in me. io per primo, grazie al cazzo. il problema è solo il tempo, mi ci dedicherei di più se non avessi problema più urgente: l'aspetto fondamentale della vita lyonnaise è la ricerca ossessiva di una casa. perché unodei grossi inconvenienti è la lingua: "bonjour, je suis un jeune rechercheur italien qui cherche un apartment..." che già fa ridere. un ricercatore che cerca. claro. oppure "je voudrais voir..." poi ti blocchi perché non sei sicuro che voudrais o quel cavolo di verbo che metti sia giusto. e chiaramente non lo è al 90% dei casi. cheppoi le agenzie vogliono mille garanzie e garanti. un francese che ti copra il culo per 20.000€. bum! 'ndo cazzo lo trovi un francese che si fida di te, italiano, con i jeans strappati in fondo sotto le scarpe, i lacci arancioni, una felpa col cappuccio, magliette di dubbio gusto e il lettore mp3 sempre acceso con spazzatura elettronica. suvvia siamo seri.
comunque l'idea iniziale di oggi era girare per angenzie per cercare di vedere un po' di case. chiaramente il sabato sono praticamente tutte chiuse e quindi uno s'attacca. ho già capito che mi partiranno le prossime mille pause pranzo, mais oui, c'est la vie.
l'unica cosa che non cambia mai, a milano, monaco, barcellona, lione è la felpa col cappuccio di fishbone. che passeggia con andatura da pinguino sotto una pioggerellina sottile, spazzatura elettronica nelle orecchie, mani in tasca, un respiro profondo e gli occhi chiusi.

H.C.E

2007-08-07T16:37:00.000+01:00

H.C.E. is a state, a state of mind. it is. and it will forever be.
H.C.E. is a story about me waiting for a train. and this is a thing that maybe only two grown up dudes can understand. because at that time, they were in that place.
H.C.E. isn't fab, neither fabrizio, or fishbone
H.C.E. is none of them, but even a little bit of each of them, like... sometimes Fab will popup, with a capital f and you know how I hate capital letters.
H.C.E. as a state of mind was born too long time ago and the circumstaces tickle my brain a little bit, but they suddenly flow away, because i just don't want to remember my teenage riot, my very first time with j. joyce.
H.C.E. saw everything. deaths and paranoia and sweat and fear and anger.
H.C.E. is the memory of changes: understand what to do, where to go. and doing it. for real.
H.C.E. is "to appear" and "to disappear"
H.C.E. is my sick brain, in the bullshit i wrote abroad: the ones which make people laugh and the ones which make people cry.
H.C.E. is me, gaping in front of Tori Amos
H.C.E. is a dullboy's rhetoric. a dullboy who doesn't have anything to say and too often hides behind someone else's words.
H.C.E. are the nights spent playing darts in panni's pub.
H.C.E. are the stupid voices up in my head.
H.C.E. es solo niebla, joder.
H.C.E. is who i wish to be, without accounting for anything, or better; it is who i already am, without compromises
H.C.E. is a rag bear. that is my hobbyhorse.
H.C.E. is the music that i have in my ears allday long. the music which hides the stupid voices and, more often, represents their soundtrack.
H.C.E. is a Kandinskij's improvisation. Let's say the #5.
H.C.E. is the right place at the wrong time. or the wrong place at the right time.
H.C.E. is irritatingly DADA
H.C.E. appears and disappears, cuts and pastes.
H.C.E. are fortytwo flips of a coin and fortytwo times head.
H.C.E. is childish and disappointing.
H.C.E. is a perspective escher's nightmare.
H.C.E. est pour moi celui qui le duc d'auge est pour cidrolin, et toutefois
H.C.E. est pour moi celui qui cidrolin est pour le duc d'auge.
H.C.E. is the fragile selfesteem of jack.
H.C.E. doesn't exist.
H.C.E. is bosch's the garden of delights.
H.C.E. is a storm, outside, and a cool night without the slutty moon.
H.C.E. is a fantomas' track, let's say 4-11-2005.
H.C.E. is the hate for olives, fat children and dirty dogs.
H.C.E. is waiting room by fugazi, kissability by sonic youth, bela lugosi is dead by bauhaus, prayers for rain by cure, hamburgher train by primus, sabotage by beastie boys, man eater by nic endo, go on beef by feadz, key is a fact that a cat brings by melt banana, closer by nine inch nails, you can't go home again by dj shadow, alec eiffel by pixies and all those stuff i use to listen to.
H.C.E. sono le muse inquietanti di de chirico.
H.C.E. are the billions of gigs i saw, breathless.
H.C.E. is "to disappear" and "to appear" because we're all invisible, shadows jokes lies hot feelings inside cold shivers.
H.C.E. is what is resting, i.e. memory of a twisted past or post-it in the present and maybe a magnetic board for the future.
H.C.E. is my blind spot, with its words and fantasy and sincerity and magic.
H.C.E. è il miracolo di quando il mondo si trasforma da scaladigrigio a technicolor senza passare dal via sottoforma di un funghetto di monopoli a largo augusto.
H.C.E. is a deep black bass, that finally starts uttering pleasant and sincere sounds.
H.C.E. are husker du in the brain, my bass over the shoulder and the sweater's hood which hides my eyes: darkness and an empty street.
H.C.E. è la tavola periodica degli elementi. soprattutto all'incirca il molibdeno.
H.C.E. is i'm sick of the old things so i dig a hole to bury... pain
H.C.E. sont clairements les fleurs bleu.

as Man Ray...

unconcerned but not indifferent

...Haveth Childers Everywhere.

qué guai!

2007-08-06T15:41:00.000+01:00

sixth of august. afternoon.
it's quite weird.
it's quite weird milano today: sunny and cool.
it's quite weird to think that less than 24hrs ago i was in spain.
it's quite weird the feeling of happyness for a beautiful spanish week and at the same time the melancholy of something that suddenly ends just in the moment it makes you feel good.
and it's quite weird to be here, now, in front of my pc, trying (better: pretending) to work, and trying to write about this funny week, made of spanish lessons, britannic jokes, italian lazyness and portuguese wordings.
what could one say? words aren't enough, of course. you should have been there, under valencian humidity, eating paellas, drinking horchatas and speaking this funny italoportuguesespanglish, dozing in the park, and laughing out loud, always. yesterday, a this time, i was in the same park, with dèlli, before going to the airport.
i was reading a spanish novel and listening to my mp3-player. a beautiful song by the buzzcocks. Now i'm listening to the same song, in this over-airconditionated office. i can feel the taste of spain and, shit, i was supposed to write something funny or nice or howcanisay happy... but... i just can't.
ok. i can try.
First of all, a little clarification is needed. The vacation, actually, was a study tour to learn spanish. Yep, i know. i'm going to france, next autumn and maybe a french course should have been better. but that's it. i'm crazy, you know. And obviously L. (i.e. dèlli) is crazy too. but we have this weird (again) idea of vacation. yeah, good places, relax, drinks and everything, but we get bored very quickly of beaches and nightlife. so why don't we make the most of it and learn something new? and that's it. why valencia? because the flight was cheaper. maybe a silly reason, but i assure you we weren't the only ones to have made the choice this way.
(actually we were a little scared. usually - expecially in summer - the study tours are teenagers' stuff and we were afraid to find 16 or 17 y.o. bored and spoiled children. luckily that didn't happen. unfortunately older italians were much worse.)
We lived in the house of a middle-age woman (dolores), who made all the time our ears bleeding. The house was really clean and comfortable and she was really proud of it (expecially of her mattresses and bed sheets and everything). unfortunately she used to repeat it billions of time.
We spent 6/7 hrs/day at school: from 8am to 2.30pm we had 1 hour of individual class, 1 conversation hour and 4 hours of group classes. the afternoons were free, and we spent most of the time mucking around in the city. so let's speak about the school. i loved it and i learned a lot of things. actually the first day i felt a bit frustrated. the other guys in the school seemed to be interested only in disco, beach and fashion. And most of all i hated italians, who always chat with other italians, who couldn't make the simple effort to speak a little bit in spanish to learn it. i think that learning a language isn't simply a matter of letting the others understand wtf you are saying. it's obvious. an italian in spain won't ever have much problems in understanding or asking something. but that doesn't mean that italians know spanish. unfortunately most of italian students didn't think so. and much more unfortunately i didn't have a flamethrower and i couldn't kill them. too bad, but who cares.
From the second day, things turned out better: much more fun, and most of all we found someone who weren't interested only in fashion and gossip, but who knows that in the head there's a mushy thing called brain and (that's awesome!) its use is free!
I think that's why we started to hang around with ariel and filipa. they were in my morning classes, i found them funny from the very beginning, because they spent most of the time humourousely quarreling (in french) about craps.
ariel is french/english (i know, britannic!) and he always introduces himself like my name is ariel, like the washing powder, so we deserved the right to mock him a little bit like ariel, la luz in tu vida. to be honest, he was proud to have such a name. in fact he used to say that there are very few people that can make jokes with their own names. unfortunately (for him) me and L. too can do it: for example my surname (in italian) sounds something like you pollute us and usally people can't understand that dèlli isn't the first L.'s surname, but only a part of it, and call her so without knowing that dèlli literally means of the.
filipa is portuguese and, like ariel does, studies politics in UK. Their funny quarrels were about ariel's habit to repeat things thousands of time and filipa's love for precision. dèlli and me spent hours watching them and i think that the portuguese expression we learned - falar pelos cotovelos (the correct pronounciation is falar peeloush coutouveeloush and it's better if you say that with a potato in your mouth), that means talking all the time - it's very adeguate.
I would like to speak about all our chistes, but i'm afraid that they wouldn't be funny for who wasn't there.
yesterday i thought about what i could have written on this spanish week, but now, i realize i can't say what i would say, because i miss everything. i miss the school, i miss the park, i miss the food, i miss so much ariel and filipa, i miss the city itself.
Maybe this melancholy is something related to the future, the thoughts about the distance between me and dèlli, a new french experience that is waiting me. a scary feeling that maybe science is not what i really like doing. i want to know new places, to learn languages, to keep on writing (like ages ago), reading and so on.
maybe i'm only a stupid child, who loves stupid and simple things, like listening to his favourite song in the park, reading a nice book, learning something about other countries.
maybe i'm scared about what i'll do. this is what i was thinking about one night, in valencia. i was sitting in a bar. I was drinking an horchata and that's why i felt like snoopy, after an airfight with the red baron. and actually snoopy is what i really am, maybe a dreamer ... but what can i do if i like so much pretending to be a great writer, sitting on my red doghouse, with my typewriter?
maybe the más mejor thing is to stop thinking about all of this, and start doing it. keep on running.
as dee dee ramone always said... one-two-three-faw.