Have you ever combined two ingredients you’re slightly iffy about and produced something rather wonderful? No, neither have I. I’d started to wonder if it was possible.
Until I heard Dolly Parton’s version of Stairway to Heaven.
You can listen to it here. (Along with some other songs I like. I know, I’ve just discovered this neat little playlist thing and I think it’s fabulous, but I’ll get bored soon enough.)
One of the most important, and useful, books to have come out recently in Italy isn’t a novel, but an exposure of the role played by the Camorra, the international Mafia-style structure with its base in the organised crime of Campania, the region around Naples and, in many ways, a state within a state. The book’s called, with a brutally neat play on words, Gomorrah. Written by Roberto Saviano (see right), it’s sold 600,000 copies in Italy and earned its author the dubious privilege of needing police protection. He may be living abroad as I write this. Just last week, the newspapers published recorded conversations between a Camorra capo and his underlings, in which the capo expressed his hope that investigating magistrates hadn’t read what the book had to say about him. It says something about the weird isolation in which these people live that he thought his secret might be safe.
Gomorrah has now been translated into English. There a review of it in the New York Times, where you can find the publishing details. Italy isn’t just pizza and Piero della Francesca, as of course you know. The fact that a prime minister can control the entire television system to ensure that bad news doesn’t happen ought to be proof enough. But the extent to which the country manages to live with its dark shadow, not only in Naples but throughout the nation, from Verona to Bari, from Milan to Palermo, remains a source of dreadful wonder. It’s as though it were always noon and the shadow were a small tight circle hobbling the country’s feet.
If you think I’m Johnny One Note when it comes to harping on about gay issues, you should visit the wingnuts’ answer to Wikipedia. It’s called Conservapedia (they always did have a way with words) and you can find it here.
Conservapedia has published a list of its ten most visited pages. You have to see it to believe it.
Thanks to Joe.My.God for this.
Leaks from a police investigation into the suspicious bankruptcy of a polling company employed by former PM, Tony Blair, have uncovered evidence that the information broadcast by both the BBC and independent television was deliberately manipulated to present the prime minister and his government in the best possible light. Throughout his period in office, on a daily basis, those responsible for what was seen and heard on five out of the six national news programmes put their heads together and decided what to emphasise, what to spin and what to conceal. Lies were told and facts omitted. Thanks to Blair’s financial control over the commercial networks, and his political control over the public ones, this was a mug’s game.
Shocked? You should be. Except that it wasn’t Tony Blair, the BBC and commercial TV. He never had the chance. It was Berlusconi, the RAI and Mediaset, which belongs to Berlusconi. Still shocked? You still should be. Berlusconi is. He’s called the Repubblica journalists who published the story a couple of days ago ‘jackals’ and accused them of trying to interfere with the process of electoral reform. Next thing you know, we’ll be told the RAI is now in the hands of the communists.
I’ve just worked out how to publish photo albums with Picasa. So if you’d like to see all the shots of last summer’s Rome Gay Pride, including the ones that I didn’t post, now’s your chance.
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| Gay Pride Rome June 2007 |
This is the small gold monkey I gave Giuseppe for his 50th birthday. He doesn’t normally wear gold – he prefers silver – but the monkey comes from the same people (Pomellato) as a similarly minute camel (they’re more or less the size of a thumbnail), given to me by Giuseppe some years ago. Animal symbolism is problematic at the best of times, but Giuseppe does have a mischievous streak and you already know about my camel thing. The alternative was a flamingo because he paints flamingoes, but I love the way the monkey genuinely hangs from the ring, just the way a monkey would.
Pomellato does a whole series of small gold animals in a range they call their Dodo collection; you can just see the silhouette of a dodo on the monkey’s chest. Part of the cost is donated to WWF, so they’re not just pretty, but marginally useful. Well, maybe.
If you believe that the soul weighs 21 grams (and, of course, I don’t, but still), it would take seven monkeys like this to make a soul.
http://www.youtube.com/v/ReYfDlIa-Z8&rel=1
A little something Alberto Ruggin’s local priest might enjoy. Or Ted Haggard. Or Larry Craig. Or Archbishop Arsehole of Nigeria. Or Eggs Benedict. Or just about anyone, in one way or another.
And if you’d like to know more about Pat Condell, click here.
For the full story, click here. My thanks, as ever, to the Onion (and Pierre et Gilles).
One of Italy’s longest standing jokes, the ex ‘royal’ family Savoia, hits the front page again today. No, Vittorio Emanuele, the pudding-faced capo famiglia, hasn’t tried to hire a few hookers for one of his ‘business dinners’; he hasn’t peppered anyone with shot from his hunting rifle and left him to die, or tried to open a semi-legal casino with dodgy funds and the help of a gaggle of pimps. No, his oily son, Emanuele Filiberto, whose only claim to fame is to have sold his regal aura to a pickle-making company, hasn’t been arrested for rape in Geneva, his former home. He lives in Italy now. They all do, thanks to Berlusconi. They’re back, from their down-lined gilded Swiss exile, to haunt us.
And what do the ungrateful minxes do? They ask the Italian state for damages. They’ve filed a claim for €260 million (with 54 years’ compound interest) for the ‘moral suffering’ they underwent while in exile. Plus all their confiscated belongings. Their lawyers have written a seven-page letter to the President of the Republic and the Prime Minister. Well, obviously their lawyers have written it. I mean, seven whole pages. The Savoia’s Italian just isn’t good enough. Maybe they should sue for linguistic suffering too.
By the way, the woman standing next to Vittorio Emanuele isn’t Elizabeth Taylor. She’s a fake. Still, he seems happy enough.
Just when you thought the catholic church and I had agreed,amicably, to differ and go our separate ways, news arrives of a local priest, Don Paolino (Little Paul), who has expelled one of his choristers from the choir and excluded him from all further church business. What grievous sin can Alberto Ruggin, the fresh-faced young man in the photograph, have committed?
He came out during a TV game show called Ciao Darwin, in which two groups compete to see which is better adapted for survival. In the past we’ve seen men up against women, so to speak, priests versus atheists, nurses versus doctors, fatties versus skinnies. As you can, it’s not exactly the Brains Trust, but it does have its moments. Last week saw a team of heterosexuals compete against a team of gays, including Alberto Ruggin. I didn’t see the programme myself, so I can’t imagine what was involved, but Don Paolino, no doubt attracted by the prospect of seeing so many perverts in one place, didn’t miss a minute. And there was his choir-boy and Sunday school teacher, all six sinful feet of him, parading his shame. The only word for it, as far as Don Paolino’s concerned, was ‘disgusting’. Followed by Fuori! Surprising? Not really. As my father used to say, What can you expect from a pig but a grunt?
Ruggin, in the meantime, seems to have devoted the last few years of his life to the parish and Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, a party not renowned for its gay-friendliness. He could spend a few moments of his newly acquired free time to ask himself whether his energies might not be more profitably channelled into organisations that don’t regard him as a social pariah and sexual deviant.
CHARLES LAMBERT 