sgrunt

USA, 2003-2005
Travel Notes

:: 19.8.03 ::

– Center of the World –

The first American I had the honor of speaking with is called Andrew Cavanna, his father is from Bettola and his relatives produce coppa and salami in Groppallo.

:: D 20:23 [+] :: …

:: 19.9.03 ::

– Center of the World –

Contrary to what Corriere della Sera wrote, Hurricane Isabel probably won’t cause “another blackout bigger than the one in August.” The prestigious daily newspaper on Via Solferino sees New Yorkers “expecting the worst.”
Indeed, this little breeze is annoying, annoying, annoying. The squirrels on campus and some pigeons, but not all of them, unable to read Italian, feel a little taken aback by all the things flying around. As for humans, Mayor Bloomberg made a proclamation on the unified networks to all citizens, to warn them to close their windows tightly because, with all this air, they risk ruining their curtains.

:: D 18:16 [+] :: …

:: 7.10.03 ::

– Center of the World –

In the end, the characters are always there, you just have to look for them. One of my favorites here, perhaps the one I most wanted to meet one day, is the Zapatista revolutionary.

The Zapatista revolutionary, in the context of the Business School library where millions of clean spreadsheets flutter from one computer to another along the broadband wireless networks, where the carpet muffles the volume of the wannabe executives’ minds, where no one has much time to chat because time (will be) money, well in this place and on that carpet, the Zapatista revolutionary is a relief, a spectacle, an unshakeable certainty.
And he is everything, ladies and gentlemen, everything according to the rules.

Brazilian.
Long beard, but not too much.
Refinedly unkempt. But not too much.
Leather shoes to throw away. These, yes.
IBM laptop with new Intel processor. Fast.
Behind the IBM laptop screen: fluorescent yellow sticker with a star of the Partido dos Trabalhadores. Red.

:: D 22:41 [+] :: …

:: 11.10.03 ::

– Center of the World –

Engine room of disused Hudson River boat

:: D 02:53 [+] :: …

:: 9.11.03 ::

– Chicago –

Chicago is a little New York, except you listen to the blues and you can smoke in the bars.

:: D 16:42 [+] :: …

:: 14.11.03 ::

– Center of the World –

This evening, for the first time since I got here, I watched television.

It happened at the house of Marty, an American who wears leather jackets and is an equal mix of Robert De Niro, Arthur Fonzarelli and Bart Simpson, and with Shirzad, an Indian who looks like an actor from a Bollywood movie.
We made ourselves comfortable and watched the host’s latest purchase, the Video CD of “The Wizard of Oz,” the 1939 film that begins in black and white and after a few minutes blasts you with great Technicolor, bright colors, I dare say psychedelic, in the special silent edition synchronized with The Dark Side of the Moon. :: D 01:15 [+] :: …

:: 28.11.03 ::

– London –

The thing I enjoy most these days is taking a nice investment banker, taking him hard, pure and sharp, talking hard, pure and sharp, and then at the end asking him if he’s happy. And always hearing the answer – hard, pure and sharp – no.

:: D 20:09 [+] :: …

:: 2.12.03 ::

– Center of the World –

This evening I decided to treat myself to a political information program, so on the plane I watched Terminator 3.
Three things made me go wild: the fact that the bad Terminator this time was a beautiful girl, self-referential lines like: I lied and I am back, and that these were pronounced with a vague but unmistakable Austrian accent.

My neighbors on the plane were the classic New York Democratic couple. Two people in their sixties, she taller than he, who seemed to love each other very much and were traveling for a special occasion. They insisted a lot on getting a glass of champagne from the stewardess, but after all, economy is still economy, and yet in the end they got it and toasted. For a moment, among the various hypotheses that came to mind, I thought they had won some money somehow. Then I glanced at the book he was reading and underlined with adolescent precision: How to make money with stocks. Maybe later.

London is an ugly, unbearable, depressing city.
I couldn’t wait to come back here, I couldn’t wait to smell these smells again and hear these sounds again, and to relive the Gothic elevation of the skyscrapers at night. In the taxi to the city, however, my companion from the German weekly was talking to me about her job as an editor, so my eyes, out of politeness, remained fixed on her, until they couldn’t take it anymore and, just before the Midtown tunnel, they turned like a spring toward the river, and beyond the river the buildings.
Nothing else seemed, in practice, more important than those, and the deeper you entered the streets, the more the tiles fell back into place, and everything I had been deprived of returned to order, the lights, the colors, the sounds, the stammering black driver who speaks Neapolitan in his yellow taxi.

Only a dark image, it must be admitted, stole space from those colors, only a silence from those sounds, only a flash, an involuntary rapture of thought from that life. The cloister of Piacenza the day before, in the heart of the night, the yellow lights in the fog, only that total silence in the beating of the rain stole, every now and then, for a moment, the scene from the theater of those streets.

:: D 02:03 [+] :: …

:: 2.4.04 ::

– Atlantic City –

The Borgata is Atlantic City’s newest casino, which is to say, the one you need to be in now.
The furniture in the rooms is built to last three years, the closet doors already have wonky joints, the wallpaper is too thin and ugly to last, the new carpeting is already dark along the hallways – everything is designed to last, which is to say, until it’s all no longer a novelty, until it’s all no longer the place you need to be. Then the clientele will change, the sixty- and seventy-year-olds will respond to the $59.99 weekend deals, and the young people from Philadelphia and New York who want to gamble, drink free booze, and smoke inside the clubs will move to the place you need to be in three years.
It’s fun to watch, as it always is in casinos. It’s funny to watch the son of a priest and a nun who after seventeen and eleven years – respectively – decided to have two children, the eldest of whom is now sitting at the fifteen-dollar Black Jack table, and when he makes his decisions about the game he consults the table downloaded from the Internet just before leaving New York. It’s funny to watch the daughter of one of America’s most popular CEOs get lost in cocktails – always the same cocktail – and in the meantime win or lose without too much enthusiasm and without too much desperation. It’s funny to watch the others, boys and gentlemen who shout with joy at the bank’s result, who go around the tables and a little, it’s true, a little bother everyone around. And who are left to do so, because, like everyone around whom they offer for an instant the image of victory, in the end, like everyone, they will lose.

[…] Everything dies baby that’s a fact
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back
Put your makeup on fix your hair up pretty and
meet me tonight in Atlantic City.

:: D 02:14 [+] ::
…

:: 7.6.05 ::

Center of the World –

I’ll be leaving the Center of the World tonight.
But as the future president of the United States says, I’ll be back.

:: D 14:30 [+] ::
…