La botte piena e il marito ubriaco
Avere una costituzione non scritta è assai ecologista, permette un prezioso ed encomiabile risparmio di carta. Ma provoca anche effetti imprevisti e indesiderabili, come lo scontro di qualche giorno fa tra Jeremy Corbyn — che nonostante sia stato fasciato in frac istituzionali e forzato a indossare papaveri di plastica (i beneficenti «poppies» in solidarietà ai caduti di tutte le guerre) sul bavero della giacca, si ostina a mantenere le sue intollerabili posizioni antinucleariste — e il capo di stato maggiore dell’esercito Nicholas Houghton.
The Opium of the Poppies
I have lived in the capital of the remarkable country that is Britain for some 20 years now, long enough to learn a thing or two about it. As a young Italian man, hungry for art and music, I grew up in the spell of the supposed superiority of its popular culture. This place is so many interesting things at once.
Against austeritarianism
British students have descended again on the streets to claim the right to study, under assault as never before from the Conservative government. The protest, organized initially by members of the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts, eventually won the backing of many other student organizations in the wake of draconian cuts and unsustainable increases in tuition fees dictated by the Tories’ austerity agenda.
The rest on the newly-launched, impossibly glamorous global edition of Il manifesto
Contro la svolta austeritaria
Gli studenti britannici sono scesi ancora una volta in piazza per rivendicare il diritto allo studio, sotto assalto come mai prima da parte del governo conservatore in carica. La manifestazione, organizzata inizialmente dai membri della National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts, ha finito per ricevere l’adesione di molte altre organizzazioni studentesche sulla scia delle tagli draconiani e degli aumenti insostenibili delle tasse universitarie dettati dall’agenda «austeritaria» dei Tories.
Completely relevant anniversaries – Pier Paolo Pasolini
Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose notoriously controversial death happened 40 years ago to the day, was the last truly great Italian intellectual of the XX century: greater than Calvino – who was maybe better than him as a novelist, but was not a poet, an essayist and most of all a film maker as PPP – and Leonardo Sciascia, whose musings on mafia-permeated Sicily were, despite their courage, more parochial.
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Completely irrelevant anniversaries – Bohemian Rhapsody
Our popular culture is full of irrelevant anniversaries. Like that of Bohemian Rhapsody, for a start: one of the most overblown, pretentious, cheesy and nonsensical singles in the whole of popular music.
Its only merit? To encompass everything that is wrong about Seventies’ rock.
Its worst guilt? To have inspired one of the most overblown, pretentious, cheesy and nonsensical contemporary “rock” bands: Muse.
Lalala smettiamoLa
Fat Cuts
We have recently learned that the multimillionaire Andrew Lloyd Webber, the lifelong Peer who has graced our ears and eyes with countless schmaltzy musicals (wretched genre, if you ask me), has dutifully rushed back in business class from New York just in time to vote for George Osborne’s repellent tax credit cuts.
What an upper class hero!
I herewith launch a petition on Change.org to have his worldwide hit, Cats, rechristened “Fat Cats.”
Per aspera ad astra
Bella da commuovere, con quel synth dritto dritto da Gary Numan circa 1979, o giù di lì. Cercare di non sentirla troppe volte di seguito e di non cantarla a squarciagola come un povero fesso. Il resto del disco non è da meno.
INNERCITYLIVING 