Alberto Piccinni: How’s it going up there? The day in the city is a special one. As we write, there is the Roma-Lazio derby, I envy our potential future readers because they already know the result. Personally, I am a great supporter of De Rossi and his press conferences: a lover of hard but honest vintage football, even a bit of Boomer Gang in the cruel melancholy of the role, the jacket that tightens on the stomach and shoulders, a lot of old women on his head songs. The day before yesterday DDR (the acronym faithful to the line is adorable, isn’t it?) recalled one of the most famous yellow-red syndromes: Roma’s Roman players almost always play the derby badly because they are too excited, like the fans. The Truth – I would summarize – does not get along with the Show, there are things that must remain secret: art, language, love. However, sorry for the leap, the best piece on the thirtieth anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death was written by our friend Demented Burrocacao in this newspaper. I am not joking. Demented invites us to discover a «masterpiece of lo-fi songwriting» in the collection of homemade «demagnetized tapes» that were used for the documentary Montage of Heck and Universal released it separately on an album. At the time, about ten years ago, it didn’t warm hearts: the documentary was questionable, the material incomparable to any b-side, unreleased, outtake. About thirty fragments ranging from a version of And I Love Her of the Beatles nirvanata in the chords, to the poignant Letter for Frances scratched on the low strings of a guitar with a toy (who knows) from her daughter, of more than homely, private quality. But now she tries to listen to it as the real post-Nirvana album that Cobain had already announced in interviews. Weird and experimental, «the closest thing to the singer’s paintings» as Demented suggests. Lo-fi, but secretly. I just saw Nirvana’s appearance online at Tunnel on Rai3 with Dandini and Guzzanti: the piece is valid not only for the last presence of Kurt Cobain in a TV studio, but also for his absence, the way in which he disappears from the frame at the end of the song is crazy, painful, emotional. Here: Kurt Cobain who didn’t want to play the derby.
Giovanni Robertini: Spring has arrived here in Milan, but in the Milanese way: for example, “Birkenstock” has become trendy on X, and Vampire Weekend’s new album has been released on Spotify. After all, it is the hipster season par excellence, the middle world – between the winter torpor and the inevitability of summer – in which the future and the past are still possible, and the present is not worth half a controversy (a shame, eh). Kurt and the Vampires were the springs of us boomers, and today they return to manifest themselves as ghosts of conscience. Just listen to the beginning of the first piece of the album by the former New Yorkers, Ice Cream Piano, in which Ezra Koening whispers to the rhythm of a very languid indie ballad: “Fuck the world / You said it in a low voice / No one could hear you / No one but me”. Poetry of a band that watches itself as it ages, adult resignation versus young idealism, without victimism, but “fuck the world” anyway and forever. Whispered, like Nirvana’s guest appearance by Dandini, “it was another TV” one might comment at the risk of being pathetic, but think about Kurt in front of any Fagnani: and how do you feel like a beast? It may be spring, but nothing seems cringier to me than the present.
AP: “We escaped the draft, but we didn’t escape the war” – echoes Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend – “Every generation is condemned to make its own apology”. Nice album Only God Above Us, very high, of war, generations, time passing. Coming to our little wars, I announce that my passion for political talk stickers has reached alert level. Meanwhile there is a new bad boomer: the art critic Luca Beatrice, right-wing Foglio trend who from Formigli said that university students dress badly with those red stars on their t-shirts and that they are anti-Semitic. Why? “Because Meotti wrote it on the Foglio”, verbatim. As we know, calling those who criticize Israel anti-Semitic is pure TV bullying, Mieli and Molinari started months ago, they still haven’t stopped. I say, if you really don’t want to listen to Biden and the doubts of American Jews about Netanyahu, someone should stand up and remember that anti-Semitism has always been right-wing stuff, the Pluto-Jewish Freemason conspiracy, Meloni’s cries against Soros and the banks international, stadium curves. In any case, as a Juventus player and newly appointed president of the Art Quadrennial, Luca Beatrice as a villain is little more than a character actor, the typical analpha male (ok this one came to me on Whatsapp). You can find it in the posts where we discuss Once upon a time tomorrow or the schwa or Ilaria Salis. In the same category I would also put the twenty-year-old from Forza Italia with the coat of arms on his lapel like in 1994, a certain Simone Leoni, who shouted “go to work” the other evening at Del Debbio’s. But more sophisticated: he looked like a cross between Biff. the bad of Back to the Futureand Alex’s Clockwork Orange. And in the meantime there was a lot of talk about Baby Touchè, have you seen it? No, I recovered it on X, just to put it in my collection.
GR: I saw it, I also read the Instagram post where the trapper says he was paid a lot of money to participate in the program (already nicknamed Baby Cachet!) and that he was invited directly by the director of Mediaset. Simone Leoni on the other hand will have gone there for free, very reprehensible. After this umpteenth trash talk, I believe that Rete 4’s “give it to the trapper, castor oil to the baby gang” trend should be renewed a bit so as not to repeat itself. I’m not clear on the idea yet, but it could be something in between Squid Game, The mosquito of Cruciani and the Schlein-Conte wide field. I think about it better while I go to the park to eat ice cream, I took some very old sneakers out of the closet like the ones on the cover of Only God Above Us by Vampire Weekend. I’ll put the new Jordans and the gold tracksuit in the attic for a while, it’s spring, feel hipster!
