My Dad, the artist

This morning: Caravaggio exhibit, quick tribute to il Duomo.

My Dad's comment on Caravaggio, I mean you can tell he's an artist by the comment he makes. All of us, the people, the commoners, go "Ahhh, Caravaggio, the light, those eyes". He looks at the armors instead and goes: "Wow, I'm impressed by the way he renders the color black".


Caravaggio, "La cattura di Cristo" (the capture of Christ)

Ok. Daddy. Chapeaux. (Hats off).

Italian kings of strips (and strippers)

Before leaving NYC I spent a couple of ... minutes observing a fascinating phenomenon I was unaware of, one of paramount anthropological value nonetheless: the crowd of tweens and teens slouching along the aisles of Barnes and Noble (Lincoln center branch) flipping through the pages of mangas. All the mangas those shelves can carry. All the mangas their hands can muster. Avid, pudgy, sweaty fingers and all.

I made a mental note: to further explore the power of sex as sociological denominator for the young and innocents, in this moment in this place - possible subject for a book. And once in Italy I found myself in rapture at the local version of B&N (Librerie Feltrinelli): but of course, OUR kings of strips and strippers, how could I have forgotten when I too was a slouching (never sweaty tho) set of vertebrae and fingers, learning the way of the fumetto erotico?

Thus the change of my icon on AIM to



and a suggestion for all my readers: to abso-fuckin-lutely check out, if they haven't yet

1) Guido Crepax: his Valentina is the national standard for comics hotness, cosmic, regal, ruthless hotness. AND *** Crepax began to work as a graphic artist and an advertisement illustrator, producing also covers for jazz LPs, including Gerry Mulligan, Fats Waller, Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong!!! ***

From Wikipedia:
"...Valentina's stories are a weird mix of oneiric, science fiction, fantasy, espionage and (especially later) erotic themes. They met a large success in Italy and abroad, especially in France..."

2) Milo Manara: his ladies make you wanna have sex on the spot (ops, maybe we don't need further encouraging?), they're like... always wet, stripping, masturbating. A lot of miseducation of Ducati goes back to those strips. "Il Gioco" (the game), m-mmmm. He who could draw silicone lips when no one had even invented plastic surgery. Those lips, parting, the tip of those tongues, flashing behind sets of perfect teeth.

From Wikipedia:
"...Like his compatriot Tinto Brass, he evidently has a fixation with the female buttocks. Many of his comics have themes of bondage, domination and humiliation, voyeurism, the supernatural, and the sexual tension beneath various aspects of Italian society. The works vary in their explicitness, but the general mood is playful rather than misogynistic..."

3) Hugo Pratt: Corto Maltese, his masterpiece. For the historic research, the trait, the squinting of those blue eyes, lost in horizons, aboriginal, metaphysical horizons. Trivia: Milo Manara was a pupil and late collaborator of his. Trivia: Crepax's Neutron (Valentina's beau) was protagonist of a long solo graphic novel published in the magazine Corto Maltese. Don't you love it when artists cross paths? It's like jazz: small/big combos like magmatic cells exchanging particles by osmosis.

Wiki, again:
"...Due to his rather mixed family ancestry, Corto had learned snippets of things like kabbalism and lots of history. Many of his stories are placed in real historical eras and deal with real events: the 1755 war between French and British colonists in Ticonderoga, colonial wars in Africa and both World Wars, for example. Pratt did exhaustive research for factual and visual details, and some characters are real historical figures or closely based on them, like Corto's main opponent, Rasputin..."

4) Diabolik, well, the ideal man for all of us Eva Kants (trivia: a bunch of male designers behind it, yet it's the brainchild of two ... sisters!) >>> see image above, Diabolik and Eva.

Read them. You'll like them. With all of your brain, and all of your senses.

to be fair

It has been brought to my attention that as a journalist i should be more accurate with my facts, particularly when I am the fact in question.

So, ok, I don't really sleep an average of 5 hours when in Nyc. Matter of fact, lately I've been sleeping even less. I know I'm not the only one. Does it make me feel any better?

Hell no.

eleven and counting

First night of sleep in my childhood bed: eleven hours, straight.

How come I only sleep an average of 5 hours per night when I'm in New York?

Yes, in case you were wondering, it was a rhetorical question.

And one more tribute for 2005

the year of musical thinking

Joan Didion will forgive - I hope - the poetic licence I take here.

Her "Year of magical thinking" is a tale of mourning and a tribute and I concede mine may not be a tale of mourning. A tribute though - THAT, yes. It is a tribute to music, to what it has done to me, to what it has been for me, in the past twelve months. Formative, informative, cut deep and healed (not too) fast - and the scars I have will last me a lifetime.

Do i regret any of them? No.

Do I blame her? No. I could never blame her for all the things in C she brought me: C-chord suites and solos, cyanide breakups, courtship, care, cunning chivalry, curioisity cum cat. A conundrum. A C-section: and here I am born. Not better. New.

Check it out.

So, music. Jazz, hip-hop, funk, classical, opera. My favourite things for 2005? I leave it to those who compile "best of" lists and delude they will last more than the time to refresh the page. But I WILL throw a few bones to my ... dawgs. Not necessarily made in 2005. But relevant - for me at least - in the year that is almost to RIP.

Christian McBride's Live at Tonic, due March - what I've heard of it, over a dinner with McBride himself and no side dish of sleazy comons (amen and hallelujah), is worthy. No doubt.
Ethiopiques (Either/Orchestra), Live in Addis -- with the partecipation of Mulatu Astatke; his soundtrack for Jarmusch's Broken Flowers is a delicacy. Jarmusch told me Archie Shepp used to live in his loft in the Sixties. Schepp, invention and cirumvention of musical canons, one of the most elegant cats ever. I see a line from Shepp to Astatke, elegance, exotic elegance, the fun of deconsruction.
Gold sounds, Ali Jackson, Cyrus Chestnut, Reginald Veal, James Carter - because it was about time someone made the Pavement a jazz suit. Not a suit, a t-shirt more like. And yes because Ali and Reginald hold a special place in my heart. And yes I was wrong on James Carter.
Jeremy Pelt, Identity: because his is one experiment in jazzatronica we don't want to kill ourselves for. For once. Listen to Scorpio (naturally it would be better if you had access to Mr. Pelt's own live recordings of the 12' composition: he would play them for you and illustrate how the piece progressed as the quartet developed an ... Identity. Precisely. Then he would do something like asking for some fresh Electronic music to check out and you would say ... Telefon Tel Aviv. And he would go on iTunes and buy it and promise a sure quick death if he doesn't dig it. Well, I'm still alive)

Telefon Tel Aviv. Anything. Really. I'll drink it and pour it all over my body.

RJD2 (Deadringer), Caribou (The milk of human kindness), Prefuse 73 (One word extinguisher, Extinguished), The GZA (Word from the Genius), Dangerdoom (The mouse and the mask), Gostface killah (Supreme clientele). El-P/Cage.

4 hero.

The Roots.

Bill Frisell (East West). Metheny/Coleman (Song X reissue). The staged discoveries: Town Hall (Diz and Bird), Carnegie (Monk and Trane), One down one up (Trane)

Chemical brothers' Push the button (BELIEVE, perfect sountrack for the perfect public restroom fuck *pubic testdoom fuck*, SURFACE TO AIR, perfect sountrack for when you feel you don't have it in your lungs to breathe, for whatever the reason, cigarettes, inedia, pain)

Fiona Apple - she and Michael Chabon should put a new spin on Mensa and inaugurate a buen retiro for geniuses who happen to be unfairly, supernaturally gorgeous looking too.

Wynton Marsalis, Live at the House of tribes. For reasons I don't need to explain.

Carla Bley/Charlie Haden, Not in our name. Hasta siempre la LMO, Liberation music orchestra. Not in our name, and little does it matter that it once was Cambodia and now it's ... you pick: New Orleans? Iraq? Bolivia?
Bley/Haden, same flavor, same fervor, same fever as in 1969.

Bley on the critics who found the new album "weak", compared to the 1969 debut: "So it's not as fiery? Maybe we should take machine guns and shoot everyone in the audience. That would make it more of a frisky record. Maybe we could get some guns and go after some of those reviewers. Then we'd be true revolutionaries".

Bley on music: "it's a calling. We do music like breathing. We have to. That's how we wonder what life's about"



At the NYC School of rock (the inspiration for the movie with Joe Black, and no they weren't credited for that, and yes there were roumors of a lawsuit there, for like... 3secs), speaking with Gracie, 5 years old. FIVE. She looks like Dakota Fanning, she's as sassy and witty (and has as raucous a voice) as Frances McDormand. She already knows she wants to be a drummer. And her favourites bands, for 2005 and ever are, and I quote:

"Ramones, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin".

5 years old ladies and gentlemen. And to know what she wants. And for that to be music.

In the words of jazz "Blessed is the child"

*Of course it helps that we live in a country where unlike, say, Iran, a large body of music hasn't just been banned (did you read the news? Nothing like that had happened since the Seventies). Then again we do have the case for Intelligent design. So maybe we'll get there. To the musical Torquemada (remember the Spanish Inquisition?)

What I want for Christmas

The Kenneth Cole AIDS Day t-shirt.



The gold-plated cokespoon01

And I'll have the first one shipped to whomever in the Vatican still believes using a condom is a mortal sin.
And the second one hung from the pinetrees around Turin -- the winter Olympics being the best way to call the attention to a local growing pain. Well, it's been a problem for the past 60 years or so: check the phonebook under, I don't know, "automobiles"?

By the way, cokespoon01 is the replica of the cap of the cheapest pen you can possibly buy in Italy. So blase'. Like drinking champagne out of plastic cups.

Makes me wanna throw up all the Krug and diamonds I just downed.

And this, I warn you, is as frivolous as my blog will EVER be. Now back to the usual gloom and jazz. Know you love it!