On a more cheerful note than the one struck by the previous post, here’s a photograph from Foyle’s, Charing Cross, London, UK (Europe, the World, the Solar System, the Universe… Remember?). Little Monsters is now a highlight! And just look what it’s rubbing shoulders with (so to speak). Wilbur Smith! Chuck Palahnuik! Nick Hornby! Will Self! What an explosion of testosterone on three small shelves; it’s the kind of display you could find yourself pregnant from just by brushing lightly up against, handbag in hand, assuming it didn’t kick your head in first. (I could have expressed that more elegantly but concentrated male hormones often discombobulate my prepositions.) I only hope Carol survives the onslaught.
All that’s missing is one of those enticing Three Quid Off stickers on the front cover, which all the others seem to have. Hmm.
(Thanks, as ever, to Jane and her roving mobile.)
I don’t live in Rome any more and many of the years I did spend in the city it was ruled by a series of insipid Christian Democrats, their names forgotten, more interested in nest-feathering than the fate of Caput Mundi. The place felt much as it must have done when sheep grazed in the Colosseum and the barbarians were a distant, fond memory. Since then, it’s been put on its feet by two centre-left mayors: Francesco Rutelli and Walter Veltroni. The centre’s been transformed in the past fifteen years, not always for the better. Some of the most characteristic parts of the city – such as Campo de’ Fiori – have been sacrificed in the name of health and safety. Public transport could still be improved, though it remains notably cleaner, faster and cheaper than that in London. (Not, I repeat, not than that in Paris.) It’s a far pleasanter place to be than Milan, ex-capital in all but name and gone to the dogs in the past twenty years. It’s been shown to be one of the safest cities in Europe and, I think, the safest capital.
So what went wrong? Why did Rome turn its back on Rutelli and elect neo-fascist Gianni Alemanno, an ex-squadrista with a list of arrests for political violence as long as your arm, proud bearer of the Celtic cross (see left), a minister in Berlusconi ‘s last government, the son-in-law of Pino Rauti, suspected train bomber and founder of Ordine Nuovo? I don’t know, and if you want an answer you’ll find a lot of finer and more informed political brains than mine only too happy to provide one. I don’t know, but. But.
I’d blame a lot of the defeat on the decision to re-propose Francesco Rutelli. The first time round, he was young, innovative, attractive in a rather square-jawed knitting-pattern way. He still had the air of resistance to the institutions that he’d acquired as blue-eyed protégé to Marco Panella. Since then, he’s lost an election to Berlusconi, he’s shifted from a secular and radical position on civil issues to the kind of half-witted bigotry you get from ‘teodems’ like Paola Binetti. He’s become a mouthpiece for the most blinkered and conservative elements in Italian society. Who needs him? I have nothing but admiration for all those Romans who held their noses while putting a cross beside the man’s name, but it can’t have been easy. Next to Rutelli, even Gianni Alemanno might look like a new broom. Albeit one in the sweeping hands of Berlusconi, Bossi and the Vatican (whose current CEO also has a rather murky fascist past).
If Veltroni wanted the PD to look like a paradigm shift in Italian politics he couldn’t have picked a worse candidate than the mealy-mouthed institutionalised has-been he chose. It was a lazy decision, and a contemptuous one. And now both Rome and the entire country will have to live with the consequences.
After a long weekend of dreadful excess – due partly to the celebration of Italy’s liberation (from itself and its unwise choices), celebrated each year on 25 April by precisely one third of the population, partly to the fact that Giuseppe and I have been together for 22 years, and partly to the irresistible and typically weekend combination of like minds, alcohol and propinquity – I found myself this evening watching a documentary about airports.
Made by Report, more or less the only programme of investigative journalism on Italian television, it looked at the state of Italy’s many airports, scattered like mouse droppings in a dirty kitchen across the country and constituting a hole into which vast amounts of taxpayers’ money are regularly thrown. The programme compared the Italian situation to that in other, more civilised countries like France, Spain and Germany (oddly, the UK wasn’t mentioned), as it does every week, to Italy’s cost.
What makes the Italian situation basically shit is too complicated to go into now – hints: private vs public, competition vs collaboration, Ryanair vs the world – but what struck me was not so much the structural or political differences between the Italians and all the others, as the difference in age. Barcelona Airport is run by a rather attractive young man who can’t be more than 35. Ryanair’s European representative might have belonged to the Arctic Monkeys. Ciampino, on the other hand, is managed by someone who should have been pensioned off a decade ago.
The impression the programme gave, quite incidentally to its actual purpose, was that Italy is run by old men. Old men who aren’t prepared to tell the truth, perhaps because they don’t remember what it is, or that it might be important. Some of them were almost as old as Berlusconi.
Who still hasn’t told us what his plans are to save Alitalia.
This is very exciting. Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys teams up with Miles Kane of the Rascals. They’ve called themselves The Last Shadow Puppets and made an album – The Art of the Understatement – which, judging from this song and the title track, is a weird and hypnotic mixture of the Walker Brothers, Morricone and the inimitable Alex Turner himself. You can find out more about it here. You probably know all this already, but I can’t resist telling you again..
Steve Bell gets it right, as usual. I wanted to post this next to Tom Raworth’s wonderful take on the Hirst skull, but I can’t find it anywhere. Perhaps someone can help. (Tom?) It’s going to be the season of the crystal skull, I imagine, with the fourth Indiana Jones film and the news that all the crystal skulls in the hands of the world’s museums were actually sculpted out of caked snot by a German cheese-maker in the late nineteenth century, or something to that effect. Ho ho.
No one seems to know who did this. Just as long as they keep their hands off Cellini’s Perseus, seen below from the front and behind – gloriously, almost fetishistically lit, so that he looks like one of those body-buffed CGI Spartans from 300. David’s no slouch as a sex object, despite this final humiliation and his second life as a fridge magnet complete with wardrobe. But I’ve always had a preference for the rather rougher trade feel of the Cellini, and the fact that the faces of Perseus and the Medusa look almost identical, with the latter a slightly smaller version of the former, as though Cellini were trying to tell us something about power, as he does in his Autobiography. A few years ago, it was possible to get to within a few feet of the sculpture during its restoration and it was extraordinary to see how distorted the proportions are when you stand eye- or chest-level to it. It wasn’t designed to be seen that way, of course, but even from below the sheer weight of the arms and legs is impressive. Just try slipping a pair of magnetised knickers over those thighs.
If you don’t visit Joe.My.God (and you should, you should), you won’t see videos like this. Which would be an awful shame.
One of the most intriguing aspects of last week’s elections here in Italy – perhaps the only intriguing aspect – is that so far no one has cried Brogli! Broglio is the catch-all phrase for the dirty business that goes on around voting time pretty much everywhere these days, in one form of other, more or less subtly, from Zimbabwe to Florida. Italy, of course, has a rich and vibrant history in vote-buying, the altering of ballot papers, intimidation, illicit photography in the polling booth; the usual stuff. Two years ago, the centre-left’s narrow victory produced hysterical accusations from the Buffoon, which only died away after a recount indicated that the margin was actually wider – not narrower – than it had seemed. This time, though, with the Buffoon’s bum firmly on the armchair of power, not a peep of electoral ill-doing. It’s almost as though Italy were Sweden.
Which is rather odd. Only days before the elections, Marcello Dell’Utri – the man who thinks Berlusconi’s Mafioso stable-hand was a ‘hero’ because he didn’t shop his boss – was outed as the senator who’d tried to buy 50,000 ex-pat votes in South America for the very reasonable sum of €200,000. Nobody seemed to care very much about this at the time, and no doubt Berlusconi will sort the problem out in his usual way, with a law exculpating senators whose first name begins with the letter ‘M’ from crimes involving sums of money below €200,001. What’s interesting though is that votes are so cheap in South America.
According to journalists working for a programme called Exit on La Sette, the only national TV channel not controlled directly or indirectly by Berlusconi, a certain Raffaele Lombardo, the man who swept the board in the regional elections in Sicily, was distributing bags of shopping worth €50 each to voters – along with a facsimile of the ballot paper, with a nice big black cross on Lombardo’s party. Oh yes, and a helping hand was frequently offered in the polling booths thenmselves, just in case the voters had nowhere to rest their groceries.
At the going rate in Sicily, 200,000 votes would have cost Dell’Utri the tidy sum of €10 million. It pays to shop abroad.
CHARLES LAMBERT 