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Leaving Milan

Illegal Danish 3 Prelude - Starcraft 2 Cinematic WoW Parody by Myndflame

"About “Illegal Danish 3: The Ballad of Dirti G”
Van Kraken has created his ultimate brew, the flask of ten thousand souls. The flask is so powerful that only by combining it with the power of the Illegal Danish can it be consumed without fear of death. Even coming into contact with a single drop could be fatal, so Van Kraken forces the remaining residents within the corrupt city of Gnomeregan to help him build a device capable of containing its power. While evaluating the device he realizes that it’s been designed only for a gnome, and with his enemies closing in and relations wearing thin with his allies he must quickly find a susceptible gnome to harness the power and lead his army of Kraken Knights." (Clint Hackerman aka Myndflame)

Ewan Morrison's "Distance"

"He couldn't watch a video, he couldn't watch TV because of the celebrities and the adverts and the adverts endorsed by celebrities, he couldn't jog or walk the streets because they would be filled with drunks, he couldn't eat because even the though of it made him sick. All he could do was sit before the computer. Yes, lose himself in another world. Take the bottle through. Log on to Second Life.

The waves were crashing. he was back on the beach and surrounded by people. Zed Reeves and Tame De Niro and Devil Huston. The animation was better tonight. When he hit the forward button he moved without delay. When he hit fly he flew, when he hit stop-fly he descended. It was the usual place, the place marked haven. Where people started before him. Tony Schwarzenegger and Tina Bardot were sitting on a bench together. He walked towards them. The icon said they were chatting. He wanted to sit and chat. He went through the menu to find the sit command. A bubble appeared/

'You do not have enough credits to sit here. Do you want to buy credits?'

No. He walked back and approached a svelte woman in a silver jumpsuit. Kiki Kidman. The drop-down menu gave him options: chat, shout. A box opened. Speak: 'Hi, Kiki, wanna chat?'

No reply. Kiki turned black. A box opened. 'Kiki is shape shifting right now.'

Whoever Kiki was. Some woman in Taiwan, or Hong Kong, some man in New jersey or Suffolk. He walked away.

The speech bubble opened. Message from Ziggy Cruise.

'Hi, Dad,' it said. 'What you doing online?'

Tom hit the turn button. Ziggy was in front of him. His son had changed. Ziggy was a fully grown man now, had beard and a black suit. Tom wanted to type: 'You should be in your bed.' He hesitated. Drank another mouthful.

'Though I'd find you here sometime soon,' his son said.

He needed to log off, right now. This was no place to meet his son. He typed.'Nice to meet you too.'

'Did you check out the disco? It's total cheese but they play no bad tunes this time of night. Mum's asleep, by the way. Total fluke meeting you. S'cool through.'

Ziggy was a man now.

'Sean, can't do this, I'm new here. Can I call you?'

'Follow me - show you some good shit. Be cool. By the way you got to do something about your avatar - it's not fully formed. Go to appearance on the drop-down menu and click on change.'

Sean was talking to him. With attitude. Tom could almost her his voice. He followed his son through the park over the beach to this place called Center. Pictures of landscapes floating in the sky, drop-down menus that said 'Go there' - a desert, a snowy wasteland, an infinite city.

'Cool huh, Dad? You wanna fly to the city with me? Watch a movie together?"

Tom was in tears.

'Gotta go'

No escaping anything. When was the last time he'd taken Sean to a movie?

'Gotta go, kiddo.'

'Say hi to your girlfriend for me. Mum says I can meet her Weds. That cool?'

'Yes, OK. nite nite.'

Tom logged off. Minutes staring at the screen, crying. OK, I'm crying I'm fucking crying. Let me be. The glass to the mouth. The trip to the kitchen to refill. Ok, he was a drunk. [...]" (p. 368-369)

Dan Falk on the meaning of time (The Guardian)

Carabinieri vs NYPD (The New York Times)

"The carabinieri, whose name comes from the carbine rifles they once carried, were established in 1814 by King Victor Emmanuel I of Savoy, as an Italian version of the French gendarmerie. Their distinctive two-pointed hat, the lucerna — with its bright red plume emerging from a large cockade — was their brand, and it made them positively regal. Some carabinieri still wear the lucerna, along with the ceremonial patent leather white belt, cartridge case and trimmings. Although special divisions of the carabinieri also wear khakis and blue fatigues, even these conventional paramilitary and emergency-service uniforms are much better tailored than those worn by the N.Y.P.D. Even when compared with other Italian police departments, the formality of the carabinieri projects greater dominion over the law. They carry themselves with grace and authority. Some of their garb is purely decorative (the cartridge cases and the swords are vestiges of another time), yet they look indisputably like guardians and protectors." (Steven Heller, The New York Times)

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Robert Sheffield's Love is a Mix Tape (2 of 2)

From Love is a Mix Tape by Robert Sheffield, Random House, 2007. 

"The synth-pop duo fantasy 

"Every time I have a crush on a woman, I have the same fantasy. I imagine the two of us as a synth-pop duo. No matter who she is, or how we meet, the synth-pop duo fantasy has to work, or the crush fizzles out. I have loads of other musical fantasies about my crushes - I picture us a a Gram-And-Emmylou country harmony duo, or as guitarists in a rock band, trading off vocals like Mike and Keith. But for me, it always comes back the synth-pop duo. The girl is up front, swhishing her skirt, tossing her hair, a saucy little firecracker. I'm the boy in the back, hidden behind my Roland JP8000 keyboard. She has all the courage and star power I lack. She sings our hit because I would never dare to get up and sing it myself. She moves the crowd while I lurk in the shadows, lavishing all my computer-blue love on her, punching the buttons then shower her in disco bliss and bathe her in the spotlight. I make her a star" (p. 132)"

La ricercatrice delusa dall'Italia «Volo negli Usa, qui non ho futuro»

"[Rita Clementi] Ha lasciato l'Italia, così come aveva promesso, la ricercatrice precaria di Pavia che ha scritto al Presidente della Repubblica Giorgio Napolitano per denunciare lo stato comatoso della ricerca nel nostro Paese e per raccontare la decisione di abbandonare l'Italia. [...] «Cosa mi mancherà dell’Italia? Be’ a parte la mia famiglia, ma questa fa parte della mia vita personale, gli Stati Uniti sono un paese con tanti bei posti da visitare. Pardon, volevo dire l’Italia». [...] «Vado via con rab bia, con la sensazione che la mia abnegazione e la mia dedi zione non siano servite a nulla. Vado via con l’intento di chie dere la cittadinanza dello Stato che vorrà ospitarmi, rinuncian do ad essere italiana», aveva scritto polemicamente nella lettera. "Signor presidente, la ricerca in questo Paese è ammalata". Di cosa? E la risposta è la solita: «Mancanza di meritocrazia e di fondi, meccanismi di promozione di carriera legati all’albero genealogico o alla simpatia»." (Il Corriere della Sera)

Leggi - Guarda

Rita Clementi's Open Letter to the Italian president 

ho appena finito di leggere le bozze...

...di un libro di un romanzo di una sceneggiatura... veramente potente... un ritratto di milano straordinario... spero che qualcuno abbia il coraggio di pubblicarlo. altro che comencini.

qualche teaser

"Una mattina d’estate a Milano può capitare di sentire un odore acre, a metà tra i sottaceti e il pesce marcio… orribile, fastidioso. Anche quando non ci sono i sacchi della spazzatura in strada la puzza si può ritrovare ovunque. Sembra avvolgere la città assieme all’umidità, l’ozono, i barboni che chiedono qualche spicciolo e i nomadi che suonano il violino e la fisarmonica a tutte le ore del giorno su qualunque mezzo pubblico. [...]" 

"Milano di notte sembra un pezzo di Koyanisqatsi, tutto a velocità schizoide, gente livida, sporco ovunque, ragazzine dell’est e travestiti del sud del mondo ad animare il meretricio moderno. Guardi fuori dal finestrino e ti senti al di qua dell’acquario. Protetta, senza saper dire perche'. [...]"

"Domenica pomeriggio, stazione Fs di un paese ai bordi dell’impero. Eurostar per Roma, grigio e rosso, cento per cento design italiano, pezzo enorme di scotch telato grigio tra una carrozza e una finestra. Tu sbatti le ciglia, riguardi e ti dici che no, non è possibile, è uno scherzo, avevi visto i treni imbrattati dai graffiti, le carrozze sporche, ma la pezza gigante di scotch sul treno no. [...]"

"Paralizzato in auto, assediato dagli scooter. Caschi firmati, tutti chiusi con l’aria condizionata, e il cellulare all’orecchio. I motociclisti hanno il cellulare incastrato nel casco e parlano anche loro. Ma cos’hanno da dirsi? E pensi che ti vergogni in mezzo a questi, non li conosci, ma ti fanno orrore lo stesso."

Robert Sheffield's Love is a Mix Tape (1 of 2)

From Love is a Mix Tape by Robert Sheffield, Random House, 2007. 

“I believe that when you’re making a mix, you’re making history. You ransack the vaults, you haul off all the junk you can carry, and you rewire all your ill-gotten loot into something new. You go through an artist’s entire career, zero in on that one moment that makes you want to jump and dance and smoke bats and bite the heads off drugs. And then you play that moment over and over. A mix tape steals these moments from all over the musical cosmos, and splices them into a whole new groove. Walter Benjamin, in his prescient 1923 essay “One Way Sweet,” said a book was an outdated means of communication between two boxes of index cards. One professor goes through books, looking for tasty bits he can copy onto index cards. Then he types his index cards up into a book, so other professors can go through it and copy tasty bits onto their own index cards. 
Benjamin’s joke was: Why not just sell the index cards? I guess that’s why we trade mix tapes. We music fans love our classic albums, our seamless masterpieces, our Blondes on Blondes and our Talking Books. But we love to pluck songs off those albums and mix them up with other songs, plunging them back into the rest of the manic slipstream of rock and roll. […] Most mix tapes are CDs now, yet people still call them mix tapes. The technology changes, but the spirit is the same. I can load up my iPod with weeks’ worth of music and set it on shuffle to play a different mix every time. I can borrow somebody’s else iPod and pack it with songs I think they’d like. I can talk to a friend on the phone, mention a couple of songs, download them on LimeWire while we’re talking, and listen together. The hip-hop world now thrives on mix tapes, with artists circulating their rhymes on the streets via bootleg CDs. They’re never technically tapes, but they’re always called mix tapes anyway, just because tapes are always cool. It’s a fundamental human need to pass music around, and however the technology evolves, the music keeps moving. […]
I have built my entire life around loving music, and I surround myself with it. I’m racing to catch up on my next favorite song. But I never stop playing my mixes. Every fan makes them. The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with – nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they add up the story of a life” 
(Rob Sheffield, Love is a Mix Tape, 2007, 23-26).

"Ageing Is No Longer an Unsolved Biological Problem" (Leonard Hayflick)

"TR: So it doesn't imply that there is a solution to aging?

LH: Why would you want to do that?

TR: Some people would like to slow or halt the aging process.

LH: They haven't thought about the consequences. We relate to each other by perceptions of differences in age, which would be destroyed if some chose to increase their longevity and some did not. The social, political, and economic discontinuities that would occur would be enormous. People who say they want extended longevity say they want it to be so when life satisfaction is greatest. Yet they won't know [when that is] until late in life. If you're in your eighties and you decide you want life extended when you were happier, at fifty, it's no longer possible." (Emily Singer, Technology Review)

Where TR = Technology Review and LH = Leonard Hayflick, a professor of anatomy at the University of California, San Francisco.

Another tidbit: "Essentially, less than 3 percent of the budget of the National Institute on Aging, the key source of major funding in this country for research on aging, is spent on studying the fundamental biology of aging--and that's a liberal estimate." = oh boy. 

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