August 1. The Patti Smith concert in Ostia Antica, in that wonderful scene in the middle of the excavations, has left me in a long train. Perhaps because I went there for the simple desire to see friends and friends I had not seen for some time and spend an evening with them. It took a few minutes to realize that, in contrast, the concert would be a dramatic flight in the past, one of those moments when even a minor event at the bottom might look like a music concert, pushing you to make budgets, to rethink situations on which the thought did not return for some time. So it happened and to think of it, everything was already started at lunchtime, with Paul and Donald. The latter, knowing where I would go in the evening, had pulled out of the little club house, old long playing Orme, to a concert of which the Park Appius Claudius, however, I went a few days earlier along with Patrick and his daughter Anita. Won at the end of lunch, I had even shown the long playing original Woodstock! And then in the evening Patty Smith.
She has not changed: on the scene the same way, with the band, not long in coming, seems almost embarrassed. I remember his first visit in Italy, a brief appearance during the film festival in Venice in September 1977 few days before the concert we were talking about for months and which would then be discussed for months. I was in the room very close to the stage, her young age, wearing a long blouse (identical to the one you wore last night), the order of jeans and boots. Then to Bologna, on the enormous stage, she had been literally kidnapped from the context, was, that concert, something that went far beyond the musical event. Had gathered around her the whole generation of the movement of '77 ... and then the concert was Bologna replication of another held in Milan, that of Peter Tosh. On that occasion had fallen in the basin of Vigorelli, wrapped in a cloud of smoke created by the music of cannabis and hypnotic Peter, Oreste Scalzone message from prison ...
But could that tiny little girl, even if the powerful voice and masculine, gruff, but white, bear the weight of what the generation of '77 wanted to load on your shoulders? Even then he could bear and yet it took me more than thirty years to understand all of a sudden a few nights ago, amid the ruins of Ostia Antica, in a more intimate theater of the bowl of a stadium, where his voice get better, even because something has changed in his repertoire and became more subdued.
After Patty Smith is a perfect metaphor for the ambiguities of the '77, which would then be fired in all directions, causing the dissolution aspettave permanently acquired in '68. Heir to the rock of the '70s, its rhythms, its timbre, Patty Smith had no stage, however, the strength of its predecessors. His music had and has the magnetism of Jim Morrison, does not have in its tone, its infinite despair of Janis Joplin, but not even anticipated the sophisticated and almost programmatically after the suicide of Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, which would explode in the mid- 80, after the sophisticated attacks of David Bowie and the rock hard pounding, and even much left anonymously at the time.
She was something that came before and would return later, albeit in altered form, with Bruce Spingsteeen. She remained in the echo of struggles and aspirations of the generation of '68, along with a rage that became more programmatic but did not result in a new era of political engagement. For this reason, perhaps, the generation of '77 chose it as its champion, regardless of herself in that role was to feel close even then. It is curious, to think of it, that in his return to Italy, was chosen as a theater especially for his show. The fate of Patty Smith is to continue to perpetuate a misunderstanding, always to be, at least in part, out of place. It suits not the stadiums, nor the excess of classical theater as a site of Ostia Antica evokes. Perhaps a simple, normal, theater, would be more suitable, even if the public, instill, behaved as if he were elsewhere. No real involvement of the mass, no gesture too much, even by those who were there on the wings of an evident nostalgia. The few rows of audience, standing in the parterre, and in front of the stage, it is not going to let these scenes of mass delirium that accompanied the concerts in those years. Too different context, too far this time, too much means of tragic and tragicomic.
better this way, his music was heard at last for what it is: the testimony of the second generation of decent rock, bloody in the middle, enough to last over time (and we are very happy) to go through abuses perpetrated on their bodies in those years, abuses which had swept Elvis, Little Richard, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimmy Hendrix, and by us - but for other reasons - Demetrio Stratos, who had asked his body to the limit vocal performance of human possibilities.
The other night, Patty Smith has revived his repertoire that decent, supported by a voice that has not lost its timbre, of bitter sweetness, transformed over time, become more reflective with age. Several times he brought his homage to Pasolini, in some songs seemed to overlook the poem to music and nourish it. In the end it is as if we had brought, the hurricane of those years, the echoes of a gentle breeze that fading, but that the scenario impareggiable of Ostia Antica and the fullest moon, which stood in front of the stage and behind the audience, he made one last time bright light of a soft but still bright.
August 2. Nothing important.
August 3. Aida at the Baths of Caracalla. It was the first time I set foot for a show, then Aida pposta seems made for a scenario such as the spa. I had already visited in the daytime, never at night when the grandeur of the structures and lighting sober and wise, make it a natural theater. Part of the show is already with the more traditional of the stage, though managed by a director more than decent and a very nice choreography. They were the lights to recreate the atmosphere of ancient Egypt renouncing any other special effect. However, the technical apparatus needed to create the play of light, jarring a bit 'over the immensity of the place. Now the presence of structures more complicated and appears to be a bloated price tag anywhere for qualsisisi show. Yet just review some films in black and white, or other events less expensive and with fewer resources, to understand that you can do the same great achievements, even spectacular, without exaggeration stage. In this case the natural setting could perhaps be used better, but it would take a completely different direction, to Ronconi, the place to interact with the scene.
It was not a great Aida, sometimes the presence of the pines of Rome and the walls that were captured more attention to the background. When modernity is not able to compete on an equal footing with the old, especially when it occurs in an even more evocative ruins of the imposing, then all our technology is a bit 'absurd and cumbersome.
August 4. They started in many more to come every other day, the summer lies in its soft, static continuity, inertia surrounding the thoughts and trees, and even the sea.
August 5. Sundays are days apart, even in summer, the occasional beaches are filled with tourists, cars occupy all the spaces, museums are too busy, suddenly, as a signal of war, Sunday marks the memory of what awaits us tomorrow, when returning home ...
August 6. I've read all day.
August 7. A new chapter begins to emerge as tiny as separate signals start to move in a coordinated manner, that is taking shape. No matter what, so the forms are far fewer than we are led to believe. One form, although it is different from another, must produce a structure that still stand up in its own right, so it is inevitable that some supporting lines are very similar. The isomorphism is the obvious consequence of a fundamental lack of imagination of the concrete, even when it manifests itself in the most complimentary styles of artistic expression. Even for this originality is a rare case and we will not have to be sought not so much. Often those who claim to originality at all costs is only the end devices, and indeed the greatest evil that has troubled the last century with regard to the arts is just that: the obsessive cult of originality. The ancients were not entirely wrong when he defined the art of imitation of nature. Of course it is no longer taken literally this statement, if only because of the Industrial Revolution onwards there are two natures, but reflect again on that old sentence, this can be, and you even do dovrevve. But I can already hear the laughter of cynical desecration of profession deride this as another: in mockery and derision ...
August 8. Before the sun goes down, the fog became more dense in the sea of \u200b\u200bOstia is a cloud that the sun cut into thin slices, so that sometimes akin to those of Jupiter and Saturn, the rings finally melt like an ice cream left too Long warm. Our sunsets have the grandeur of an ocean view and yet the sun seems so close, at hand, just as if you were sitting in front of a sea which is nion subsidiaries and not even imagine the boundaries. A well vdere However, this stretch of coast a bit 'is similar to that ocean, even for high waves, continuous, majestic, though not as great as those.
The darkness falls at all as we begin to eat and the music spread on the beach, only then you can see in the distance other fires and other lamps.
August 9. The new chapter is a tough kid who paws!
