auguri

"Oh my ears and whiskers, how late it's getting!"

god jul *

cacofonie urbane

mi sono persa a disegnare la linea degli edifici che fronteggiano la mia finestra milanese e a lavoro ultimato non posso che rilevarne l'insensatezza. un equilibrio senza regola che ribadisce quanto sia meravigliosamente unica questa vista.

stasera

alzando lo sguardo dal libro mi ha sorpreso questo scenario. e l'ho voluto immortalare.

attitudini

sagramatura

TEST SITES

Carsten Holler
per
Unilever Series
Turbine Hall
TATE Modern
London



Slides are a device for experiencing an emotional state that is a unique condition somewhere between delight and madness. It was described in the fifties by the French writer Roger Caillois as ‘a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind’.
The slide is an object that we associate with playgrounds, amusement parks and emergency exits. I’d like to extend the use of the slide: I don’t see any reason why slides should only be used by children and in the case of an emergency. The Turbine Hall installation is called Test Site because it enables visitors to test the functions of differently shaped slides, mainly to see how they are affected by them, to test what it really means to slide. Again, this applies both for those who actively engage in the process of sliding, and those who watch. People coming down the slides have a particular expression on their faces, they’re affected and to some degree ‘changed’. This aspect of my installation is very spectacular, as you said, because the performers become spectators (of their own inner spectacle) while going down the slides, and are being watched at the same time by those outside the slides. I’d like to suggest that using slides on an everyday basis could change us, just as other commodities are changing us. For instance, I’m convinced that the use of cars has changed our perception of time. I could imagine slides having an impact too. The state of mind that you enter when sliding, of simultaneous delight, madness and ‘voluptuous panic’, can’t simply disappear without trace afterwards. In this sense the ‘test site’ isn’t just in the Turbine Hall, but is also, to an extent, in the slider or person watching who’s stimulated by the slides: a site within.
Carsten Holler

come al solito. retroattivamente.

i buoni propositi c'erano. forse la virata dall'inglese all'italiano. forse il rientro. di nuovo a dover riassumere puntate su puntate precedenti. solito fotoromanzo.

memoria. al netto delle miniere.

+ alberto + giusi

a 25 anni dalla chiusura delle miniere di capoliveri un evento che è una festa col potere distruttivo di un rito dionisiaco. funerale : rave

party survival cupcakes @ 100%design TOKYO

my project Party Survival Cupcakes has been chosen by DesignBoom to be exhibited at 100%Design - Design Week in Tokyo

TED

ancora le valige da disfare, £££ nel portafoglio che ormai sono illusioni spazio temporali in forma di potere d'acquisto, eccomi in partenza per l'ennesima avventura strampalata. un workshop all'isola d'elba - ambita destinazione di meritata vacanza (ma sarà poi vacanza vera?) - di cui ci viene indicato questo video come introduzione concettuale. qui lo copio, visto che si può. riflessioni inutili, geniale perchè ironico e self-explanatory. see ya.

26th may 2006

ritrovo questa nota e la copio così che non vada persa.

dal caffè Clicia - Church Street - Stoke Newington
più di un mese a Londra tante cose sono successe eppure poche hanno lasciato segni, assorbite nella camaleontica schizofrenia di questa città. oggi mi sono svegliata con il solito mal di testa che mi appanna la mente - intrappolata in una bolla gelatinosa e baluginante. sono i momenti di lucidità, in cui non penso alle solite cose e persone.
vivo immersa nel colore frastornante di questo quartiere, la grande stoke newington road - mille 1£ shops che noi chiamiamo tragat, i fruttietuttovendoli, le bakerie dal profumo allettante, il nostro piccolo Taj Mahal che fa le pernaccie al Pisellone di Foster in fondo alla via. orizzonte. ho trovato anche oggi il mio angolo di chiassosa tranquillità. un caffè che si chiama clicia e ha il caotico fervore di un angolo di mediterraneo dove il clamore che si sente è il suono del lavoro e della vita del sud. ed è piacevole.

CAFFE' PELLICCI

This morning I decided to cycle along Bethnal Green Road on my way to the office. Thus I could not avoid to stop by the place Joana was alway talking about as one of the most true corners of Italy in London. Caffè Pellicci was founded by a family from tuscany in 1900 and since then has been delighting the Londoners with gourgeous breackfasts and lunches. It is best known beacuse it has been the hearth of gangster and mafia stories in the 50s.
Me - today I have been sitting here at breackfast time, reading the Guardian (did I ever say this is my favourite newspaper?), sipping from a very good cappuccino (obvious / banal!) and tasting THE BEST EVER apple and blackcurrant cruble with custard!!! and I managed to take these 2 pictures but to me shooting inside this place was like braking a familiar picture with coarseness. I will combine them with images froma web archive - because they seem more authentic? more because they amuse me.


Italian cafe gets the cream | The Guardian | 23 February 2005 | by Mark Gould

The backlash against the Starbucking of the high street has started, announced caff aficionado Adrian Maddox at the news that Pellicci's, a tiny time capsule of a caff that has stood in the East End of London for 105 years, has been given listed building status.

'Fuck me, is it that important?' said equally amazed owner Nevio Pellicci as he raced around the Formica tables serving up gargantuan breakfasts at 7am, 'Your not having me on are you?'

Pellicciís has been in the same family since it was built in 1900. Nevio was born above the shop 79 years ago. And English Heritage is not having him on.

Recommending Grade II listing inspectors lovingly describe it as having a 'stylish shop front of custard Vitrolite panels, steel frame and lettering as well as a rich Deco-style marquetry panelled interior, altogether representing an architecturally strong and increasingly rare example of the intact and stylish Italian caf that flourished in London in the inter-war years'.

But they also issued a warning: 'The 50s caf is indeed becoming increasingly rare and the recent proliferation of new chain coffee shops is threatening their economic viability.'

Around 2000 Italian owned cafes and coffee bars flourished in the UK after the Second World War. Maddox, whose website www.classiccafes.co.uk is part memorial to the departed and part calls to arms, estimates that fewer than 500 remain.

He says they have been forced out by massive rent rises and what he calls 'a campaign of corporate cultural napalming' by the coffee chains.

He says these old cafes created an artistic and social cohesion that can't be invented by corporate chains desperate to create ersatz atmosphere.

'Music, fashion, film, advertising, photography, sex, crime, the avant-garde. The cafes were the creative enclaves where it was all honed. They added an impassioned European vibrancy to Britain's deflated post-war social, artistic and commercial scene - all we get from the coffee giants is McCappuccino jobs and Clone Town high streets'.

Pellicci's has its own place in popular culture. It was a meeting place of the notorious Kray gang who lived just around the corner in Voss Street.

Nev's son Nevio junior pulls out an autograph book stuffed with signed pictures of more recent Pellicci worshippers: a sunburst of soap stars, tabloid faces and Page 3 stunners.

It's also part of the fabric for Iain Sinclair, chronicler of weird resonances of the East End, who has been a devotee since the 1960s (see interview in Classic Cafes).

The caff is a focus and social hub of the area. Nevio is small and immaculately turned out in shirt, tie and zippered pullover and matinee idol pencil moustache. He knows everyone and everyone knows him.

And he thanks a sharp-eyed customer for saving the caf from being burnt down in 1999: 'It was about 11 o'clock at night and a regular was driving past in his cab and noticed what he thought were lights on in the kitchen. He stopped and saw it was a fire and phoned the Fire Brigade. They were here very fast and managed to save us.'

One of the many regulars who have been eating here for decades explains the Pellicci strategy: 'He gets you in with them,' he says pointing to a row of brilliant coloured sarsaparilla bottles sitting in the front window, 'you pester your mum and she brings you in and your hooked.'

Nevio Pellicci says the listing is 'a great honour' but he has one dispute with the inspectors. The Vitrolite panelling is primrose not custard.

But he says the tributes should go to his mother Elide who supervised the art-deco style marquetry interior created by in 1946 one of the best local carpenters - Achille Capocci.

'Around here was all carpenters, they all knew each otherís work, but mum wanted Capocci to do the marquetry as he was the best - everyone could tell his work.'

And as a tribute to Elide Pellicci, Capocci placed central marquetry plaque marked 'EP' in a place of honour along the panelling behind the counter.

It's the 1946 work that is so significant for English Heritage: 'This work was fitted in the context of the period just after the war. This was the year of the Britain Can Make It exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, heralding modern British design, and a few years later the Festival of Britain brought a style and design awakening to the Capital. It was also a period of increased Italian immigration and a great number of new cafes and espresso bar started to open up - a modern continuation of a long London tradition that started with 17th century coffee houses.'

So will Nevio be leaving the marquetry and Vitrolite to a coffee chain when he retires? 'Over my dead body.'

A well-breakfasted customer puts down his Star and laughs: 'I always said you was in institution, or should be in one, Nev.'

alimentazione posmoderna

post per chi fosse interessato a come mangiare poco con tanto a Londra...ovvero diario di uno spuntino di lavoro all'inglese. accadde lunedi. morsa dal verme solitario della fame che mi affligge ormai da troppe settiamane (mi mancano i tortelli d'erbetta della nonna???) mi fiondo nel primo andro dall'aria gastronomica che mi capita a tiro ( well non proprio il primo purtroppo seleziono sempre gli spazi dall'apparenza linda e un po' scandinava che qui a Londra portano l'icona del feticcio alimentare piu diffusa: l'ORGANIC ) Cosi volendo fare di necessita virtu di esplorazione curiosa delle deviazioni post-anoressiche di un intero popolo mi sono ordinata un rotolino integrale contenente sedano crudo zucca cotta e l'immancabile humus (povero sostituto della maionese quando il pesto si sottrae al tiro del sandwicharo salutista) + un must del energy bursting a mezzodi: il centrifugato di carota e ginger. il tutto per la cospicua cifra di 5.50 £ cui si aggiungano i 3 £ del kebab che si e reso necessario alla mia sopravvivenza poco piu di due ore dopo. impressive?

CHIHO AOSHIMA @ Gloucester Road TUBE

chiho aoshima
'city glow, mountain whisper'
platform art
gloucester road underground station, london
25 july 2006 - 25 january 2007
http:/www.tfl.gov.uk.pfa

background
chiho aoshima, born 1974, tokyo, japan.
she uses computer technology to create detailed and complex images of fantasy worlds.
hybridized creatures are participants in the composition's narrative as well as elements in a decorative scheme.

aoshima is connected with the 'superflat' movement, a term coined by artist takashi murakami. the style is typified by the simple and emphatically two-dimensional forms employed by a generation of young japanese artists. she has taken part in high profile projects and exhibitions and has numerous upcoming
international projects including the artpace residency program in texas, USA. she also has a solo exhibition at moca lyon, in france.

'city glow, mountain whisper'
each of the seventeen platform arches contains part of an elaborate composition. it's a landscape that gradually transforms from day to night and from an urban to rural landscape. the vibrant colors keep the viewers gaze.

the piece shows a timeless world created by contemporary technology. it suggests a utopian vision of the earth in which the past and the future have merged and the boundaries between organic creatures and inanimate things have broken down.
the animal, the plant and the man-made and life is literally breathed into each building and mountain.





I have not been here, not yet...soon this post will be updated with my own pictures. Just a suggestion to whoever is coming over to London: poetic, dreamlike, delicate and imaginative, and at the same time - as barbara says - very urban.

...

l'urbanità di hackney, in stoke newington road, è forte soprattutto - e soltanto - nel grattacielo di Foster su cui la strada punta, e che segna l'orizzonte.

chiaroscuro

Yesterday I have been visiting this building nearby my office. It is the 1951-1957 Dorset Estate in Shoreditch by Berthold Lubetkin. All our bangladeshi little friends have their flat in this block. Reason why climbing the stairs you can smell curry layered over the years and imagine behind the walls there is probably a woman cooking in huge bubbling pots, whit her last son eating a candy on her arm and the radio playing old hits from the far east. As I walked through the common balconies a sense of respect emanated. From a continuos flow of light - the public - one could suddenly glimpse in the shadow small pieces of domestic lanscapes: one sofa, two chairs, one carpet qualify places where common life keeps on happening. after 1000 steps and avoiding nasty spittings from above (kids!) I reached the 11th and top floor. the view over east London is amazing, especially trough the bright air where things have clear edges and at twilight. In London I cannot stop getting amazed by the school buildings: they have a visually magic aura and I bet there is plenty of forbidden places in these old Victorian buildings: like studying in Hogwards, kids should love it!

le vélo rouge

it happens all the time. whenever I move to a new place a first glance of rootedness comes sudden as soon as owing a bike. perhaps the reason is that in cycling I see the experience of a place differing from the one of a turist - decisions mediated by public transportation.
certainly a bike is a love to me, the first emotional obstacle to a sudden departure.
my norwegian bike is now in Parma - it has been in Milano for more than one year. once an hollow-mind driver hit and broke it. it's worth mentioning the history of that bike: a second hand DBS, big frame for teutonic women and brake in the pedals. the last bargain of an old craftman that in a december of three years ago sold it to me for 400 NOK: half redemption half present before moving in a warmer and less icy - therefore less risky for bones - Barcelona.
this one instead is an even-third hand Peugeut. Red like Lamorisse's Red Balloon flying beside his little friend in his drifting explorations of Paris.
it was an Australian guy that gave it to me, the day before moving back to the opposite side of the world. it's a nice bike in the way it's reduced to its essential. I used to be the one mad for details, characters of individuality that lead objects away from being generic. my bike is a "minimum" in the modernist way: no mudguard - no lamp - no chain cover - no basket. (yet its bell portrays a fireman in action).
cycling along Regents Canal - from the Docklands to somewhere in the west ( I only went east from Hoxton Park ) - is a great visual experiences one should take whenever in London. you can still pass by old textile manufactures, beside gasometers and under bridges, get a glimpse of life happening inside an houseboat, wait for the twilight to silver the water on the way back home...

serpentine gallery

210806 Quasi

...energia elegante...

victorian camouflage

floating house @ groningen

SUBCONSCIOUS TUNNELS

SUBCONSCIOUS TUNNELS
Haruki Murakami’s dreamlike new novel.
by JOHN UPDIKE
Issue of 2005-01-24
Posted 2005-01-17

Haruki Murakami’s new novel, “Kafka on the Shore” (translated, from the Japanese, by Philip Gabriel; Knopf; $25.95), is a real page-turner, as well as an insistently metaphysical mind-bender. Spun out to four hundred and thirty-six pages, it seems more gripping than it has a right to be and less moving, perhaps, than the author wanted it to be. Murakami, born in 1949, ran a Tokyo jazz club before he became a published writer, with the novel “Hear the Wind Sing,” in 1979. Though his work abounds with references to contemporary American culture, especially its popular music, and though he details the banal quotidian with an amiable flatness reminiscent of Western youth and minimalist fiction in the hungover nineteen-seventies, his narratives are dreamlike, closer to the viscid surrealism of Kobo Abe than to the superheated but generally solid realism of Mishima and Tanizaki. We often cannot imagine, while reading “Kafka on the Shore,” what will come next, and our suspicion—reinforced by Murakami’s comments in interviews, such as the one in last summer’s Paris Review—is that the author did not always know, either.

Yet “Kafka on the Shore” has a schematic rigor in its execution. Alternate chapters relate the stories of two disparate but slowly converging heroes. The odd-numbered chapters serve up the first-person narrative of a fifteen-year-old runaway from his affluent, motherless home in Tokyo; his father is a world-renowned sculptor, Koichi Tamura, and the son has given himself the peculiar first name Kafka. He totes a carefully packed backpack and, in his head, talking in boldface, a scolding, exhorting alter ego called Crow—which is what Kafka means, or close to it, in Czech. The even-numbered chapters trace, beginning with a flurry of official documents, the life of a mentally defective sexagenarian, Satoru Nakata. He was one of sixteen fourth graders who, in 1944, while on a mushroom-gathering walk with their teacher, fell into a coma after an unexplained flash of silver in the sky. Nakata was the only one who didn’t wake up, unharmed, within a few hours; when he did wake up, several weeks later in a military hospital, he had lost his entire memory and, with it, the ability to read. He doesn’t know what Japan is or even recognize his parents’ faces. He is able, however, to learn to work in a shop producing handcrafted furniture, and when, upon the owner’s death, the factory disbands he supplements his government subsidy with a modest-paying sideline in finding lost cats, since along with his disabilities he has gained the rare ability to converse with cats. (Cats frequently figure in Murakami’s fiction, as delegates from another world; his jazz club was called Peter Cat.) One cat search leads Nakata to a house—that of the sculptor Koichi Tamura, in fact—where he is compelled to stab to death a malevolent apparition in the form of Johnnie Walker, from the whiskey label. Fleeing the bloody crime scene, Nakata hitches truck rides south to Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four major islands, where Kafka Tamura, as it happens, has recently arrived by bus.

Both the young man and the old, though independent and reclusive, have a knack of forming useful friendships. Kafka befriends Oshima, the androgynous, hemophiliac assistant at a small library where the boy can read all day and, eventually, bunk at night; Nakata in his winning simplicity finds a disciple in one of the truck drivers who give him a ride, the lower-class, hitherto unenlightened Hoshino, “with a ponytail, a pierced ear, and a Chunichi Dragons baseball team cap.” The double plot unfolds in cunningly but tenuously linked chapters. There is violence, comedy, sex—deep, transcendental, anatomically correct sex, oral and otherwise—and a bewildering overflow of possible meanings.

In a prefatory chapter, Crow promises Kafka a “violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm,” with “hot, red blood.” He assures him, and the expectant reader, “Once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through. . . . But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in.” At the center of this particular novelistic storm is the idea that our behavior in dreams can translate to live action; our dreams can be conduits back into waking reality. This notion, the learned Oshima tells Kafka, can be found in “The Tale of Genji,” the early-eleventhcentury Japanese classic by Lady Murasaki. Oshima summarizes:

“Lady Rokujo—she’s one of Prince Genji’s lovers—becomes so consumed with jealousy over Genji’s main wife, Lady Aoi, that she turns into an evil spirit that possesses her. Night after night she attacks Lady Aoi in her bed until she finally kills her. . . . But the most interesting part of the story is that Lady Rokujo has no inkling that she’d become a living spirit. She’d have nightmares and wake up, only to discover that her long black hair smelled like smoke. Not having any idea what was going on, she was totally confused. In fact, this smoke came from the incense the priests lit as they prayed for Lady Aoi. Completely unaware of it, she’d been flying through space and passing down the tunnel of her subconscious into Aoi’s bedroom.”

Read in context, in the first section of Arthur Waley’s translation of “Genji,” the episode borders on the naturalistic. Within the tight, constrained circles of the imperial court, emotional violence bursts its bonds. Both women are gravely sickened by the trespassing spirit of one of them; Lady Rokujo, a beauty of great refinement, is horrified that her dreams about Princess Aoi are full of a “brutal fury such as in her waking life would have been utterly foreign to her.” She reflects, “How terrible! It seemed then that it was really possible for one’s spirit to leave the body and break out into emotions which the waking mind would not countenance.”

From the inarguable truth of the second observation the possibility of one’s spirit leaving one’s body could be plausibly deduced in a prescientific, preëlectric age when, Oshima points out, “the physical darkness outside and the inner darkness of the soul were mixed together, with no boundary separating the two.” In Murakami’s vision of our materialist, garishly illuminated age, however, the boundary between inner and outer darkness is traversed by grotesque figments borrowed from the world of commercial imagery: Johnnie Walker, with boots and top hat, manifests himself to the cat-loving simpleton Nakata as a mass murderer of stray felines, jocularly cutting open their furry abdomens and popping their still-beating hearts into his mouth, and Colonel Sanders, in his white suit and string tie, appears to Nakata’s companion, Hoshino, as a fast-talking pimp. The Colonel, questioned by the startled Hoshino about his nature, quotes another venerable text, Ueda Akinari’s “Tales of Moonlight and Rain”:

Shape I may take, converse I may, but neither god nor Buddha am I, rather an insensate being whose heart thus differs from that of man.

Later, with some exasperation, the Colonel tells Hoshino, “I’m a concept, get it? Con-cept!” Concept or whatever, he is a very adroit fixer when it comes to such supernatural hustles as handling the entrance stone to the spirit world, where the dead and the drastically detached live in the heart of the forest like writers at the MacDowell Colony—meals and housekeeping provided and other residents discreetly out of sight.

This novel quotes Goethe as decreeing, “Everything’s a metaphor.” But a Western reader expects the metaphors, or symbolic realities, to be—as in “The Faerie Queene,” “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” and Goethe’s “Faust”—organized by certain polarities, in a magnetic field shaped by a central supernatural authority. No such authority controls the spooky carnival of “Kafka on the Shore.” To quote Colonel Sanders once more:

“Listen—God only exists in people’s minds. Especially in Japan, God’s always been kind of a flexible concept. Look at what happened after the war. Douglas MacArthur ordered the divine emperor to quit being God, and he did, making a speech saying he was just an ordinary person.”

In “Kafka on the Shore,” the skies unaccountably produce showers of sardines, mackerel, and leeches, and some unlucky people get stuck halfway in the spirit world and hence cast a faint shadow in this one. Japanese supernature, imported into contemporary America with animated cartoons, video games, and Yu-Gi-Oh cards, is luxuriant, lighthearted, and, by the standards of monotheism, undisciplined. The religious history of Japan since the introduction of Chinese culture in the fifth century A.D. and the arrival of Buddhism in the sixth has been a long lesson in the stubborn resilience and adaptability of the native cult of polytheistic nature worship called, to distinguish it from Buddhism, Shinto. Shinto, to quote the Encyclopædia Britannica, “has no founder, no official sacred scriptures, in the strict sense, and no fixed dogma.” Nor does it offer, as atypically surviving kamikaze pilots have proudly pointed out, an afterlife. It is based on kami, a ubiquitous word sometimes translated as “gods” or “spirits” but meaning, finally, anything felt worthy of reverence. One of Shinto’s belated theorists, Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801), defined kami as “anything whatsoever which was out of the ordinary.”

A tenacious adherence to Shinto in the Japanese countryside and among the masses has enabled it to coexist for a millennium and a half with Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism, and to be subject to repeated revivals, most recently, from 1871 to 1945, as the official national religion and a powerful spiritual weapon in Japan’s imperialist wars. After Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, Shinto, under the direction of the Allied occupation force, was disestablished, its holidays were curtailed, and the emperor’s divinity—based on the first emperor’s purported descent from the sun goddess—was renounced. But Shinto shrines remain, in the imperial precincts and in the countryside; its rites are performed, its paper wish-slips tied to bushes, its amulets sold to tourists Asian and Western. Shinto’s strong aesthetic component, a reverence toward materials and processes, continues to permeate the crafts and the arts. Kami exists not only in heavenly and earthly forces but in animals, birds, plants, and stones. Nakata and Hoshino spend hours trying to learn how to converse with a stone—to divine what the stone, at times easily lifted and at others heavy to the limits of a man’s strength, wants. Kami pervades Murakami’s world, in which, therefore, many Western readers will feel, a bit queasily, at sea, however many fragments of globalized Western culture—Goethe, Beethoven, Eichmann, Hegel, Coltrane, Schubert, Napoleon—bob from paragraph to paragraph.

The novel’s two heroes interact only in the realm of kami. Of their entwined narratives, the story of Kafka Tamura is more problematic, more curiously overloaded, than that of the holy fool Nakata, with its familiar elements of science fiction, quest, and ebullient heroics. As Hoshino remarks, “This is starting to feel like an Indiana Jones movie or something.” Return and release to the underworld of his childhood coma are the old man’s intelligible goals, for which he prepares with prodigious sessions of sleep. Less intelligibly, the “cool, tall, fifteen-year-old boy lugging a backpack and a bunch of obsessions” labors under an ill-defined Oedipal curse. He hates his father enough to dream of killing him, and to feel little sorrow when he is killed, but we never see the father, unless it is in the bizarre guise of Johnnie Walker, and know only that he was a famous artist and, as such, probably pretty egocentric. Kafka’s mother left home, with his older sister, when he was four years old, and when he encounters her in Shikoku it is in the form of a fifteen-year-old spirit projection of the library director, trim, prim, reserved Miss Saeki, who is over fifty. Miss Saeki and Kafka Tamura talk like this:

“We’re not metaphors.”
“I know,” I say. “But metaphors help eliminate what separates you and me.”
A faint smile comes to her as she looks up at me. “That’s the oddest pickup line I’ve ever heard.”
“There’re a lot of odd things going on—but I feel like I’m slowly getting closer to the truth.”
“Actually getting closer to a metaphorical truth? Or metaphorically getting closer to an actual truth? Or maybe they supplement each other?”
“Either way, I don’t think I can stand the sadness I feel right now,” I tell her.
“I feel the same way.”

Small wonder, as the teen-ager admits, that “the whole confused mess swirls around in my brain, and my head feels like it’s about to burst.” The Oedipus myth, shedding its fatal Greek gravity and the universality Freud gave it, just adds vapor to the mist of fancy and strangeness through which the young hero moves toward the unexceptional goal of growing up.

In the last pages, the novel asks that it be taken as a happily ending saga of maturation, of “a brand-new world” for a purged Kafka. But beneath his feverish, symbolically fraught adventures there is a subconscious pull almost equal to the pull of sex and vital growth: that of nothingness, of emptiness, of blissful blankness. Murakami is a tender painter of negative spaces. After his coma, Nakata “returned to this world with his mind wiped clean. The proverbial blank slate.” In his adulthood, “that bottomless world of darkness, that weighty silence and chaos, was an old friend, a part of him already.” Throughout this chronicle, Murakami describes his characters falling asleep as lovingly as he itemizes what they cook and eat. Refrigerated severed cat heads, like the severed human heads of Tanizaki’s tremendous novella “The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi,” have a lulling serenity, “staring out blankly at a point in space.” Making love to a woman, “you listen as the blank within her is filled.” Kafka Tamura says, “There’s a void inside me, a blank that is slowly expanding, devouring what’s left of who I am. I can hear it happening.” Heading into the forest, leaving all his backpacked defenses behind, he thinks triumphantly, “I head for the core of the labyrinth, giving myself up to the void.” Existence as something half empty—a mere skin on the essential void, a transitory shore—needs, for its celebration, a Japanese spiritual tact.

KafkaOnTheShore

L'ultimo romanzo di Haruki Murakami, per chi mi conosce sicuramente l'autore contemporaneo che preferisco. In questo libro raggiunge nuovi, stupefacenti apici di immaginatività narrativa. Una costruzione surrealista ed insieme una tragedia contemporanea. A tratti un bildungsroman: Sofocle si sovrappone a Goethe. Poi la musica, ogni scena ha il suo pezzo - sempre ricercato. Hoshino è il personaggio più riuscito. Mi compiaccio della presenza sotterranea di Truffaut.

scena prima

< Do you hear the snow against the window-panes, Kitty? How nice and soft it sounds! Just as if some one was kissing the window all over outside.I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says, "Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again." >

prefazione

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just married...

WORLD CUP CELEBRATION

AZIZIYE CAMII : la macelleria di fronte alla Simpson House

full moon dalla mia finestra


(ovvero riassunto delle puntate precedenti)
poche immagini per situare la nascita di un blog rispetto alla vita della sua ghost-writer. e sancirne l'indipendenza. sono troppo paranoica?