Rome, Mediterrenean
Organizzatrici di risse interculturali di altissimo livello – Top level intercultural fights organizersArchivio per Breaking news
J’aime Paris Chapter II – From Chinatown to the floor
In the desperate effort to ease the digestion of tandoori-Ganesh-knows-what that we had had in the Indian quarter, we headed to the Paris Mosquee to meet C’s best friend V for a shisha. Smoking the shisha together is, for the three of us, a little like buiding sticks huts for the three little pigs, but it felt a little strange for me experiencing my friends of the “Alexandria period” ( we spent 2 weeks together in Egypt organising a training session on blogs addressed to Mediterranean women journalists. You should have seen them, the only men in a total-girly envoronment…their satanic look, as a kid in a candy shop…anyway) in their everyday environment. When, after a long, pleasent walk across the Jardins de Plantes ( wow!) we got to the Musquee, V., his cell phone in one hand, the other one hand scribbling something on a notebook, was ACTUALLY working.
After having smoked our ass out remembering the old good times, P. decided to continue our tour in the Paris you don’t expect: we grabbed a metro till Place d’Italie, and then we walked all the way till the hugest Chinatown I’ve ever seen. We politely refused when P. proposed to sit somewhere and have some Chinese soup ( it was 6.00 pm, for Buddha’s sake!..or saké..), and we wondered like 4 Alices in Wonderland in some crowdy, funny-smelling shops, looking for some ( any) furniture to put in C’ apartment and for those nice porcelain cats that say hallo! with the hand.
On our way home ( the bus passed by Notre Dame, and we couldn’t help to say Oh! as always happens when you pass by Notre Dame), we went to the Monoprix ( huge French Supermarket) to get some very french Cheese, very French paté and very Italian Negroni ( aweful cocktail that tastes like gas) and we rushed home for our Parisian dinner.
I have very cloudy souvenirs of what happened after my 6th Negroni, but I can still feel the happiness I felt being surrounded by my friends, lying in C’s bathroom floor.
From Paris to San Remo
God, I missed writing on this blog, but it has been a crazy crazy week, and I barely had the time to breath.
Anyway, best thing of the week is I’ve been to Paris with my friend M and that we had a super good time with our French friends. Anyway, guess our French trip deserves an ad-hoc post, so i’ll soon inaugurate a “J’adore Paris, part II” session.
For now, only thing I can say is that I feel extremely pissed since I put my beautiful boot-dressed foot on the Italian soil. Weather is crappy, I gotta be very careful to avoid the puking flu that is affecting the office, and I’m fricking overwhelmed with things to do. But all of this could just be a small cloud passing by the sunshine of my life, if it wasn’t for a creepy phenomenon ( even creepier than astracan grannies…can you believe that?) that is occurring in these days in Italy: San Remo Italian Song Festival.
Since my mother has always tried to make my sister and I grow as Sapiens Sapiens Women, we never had TV at home and we still don’t.
This of course caused me some problems at school, because I was the only one who didn’t know cartoons jingles ( so I soon had to learn how to playback).
Anyway, at least I grew up without knowing how San Remo Festival looked like.
First ( and last) good thing I learned about San Remo is that during San Remo Eve I can go to the cafeteria next to the office even at 9.30 and still find my favourite croissant. This happens because THE Italian festival organizers work in my office neighbourhood, and must all belong to the Sara’s Favourite Croissant Eaters Club, so I’m just glad that they got out of my way for couple of weeks.
Beside that, San Remo Festival is the biggest ( and most expensive) proof that life after death exists.
Avarage age of presentor, orchestra directors ( there are more than one, and they all look aweful), public and singers is 95, and now I see why the stage is always covered with flowers: they’re probably trying to get used to their next residence ( same flowers, only 6 feet below).
Songs sucked ( they all sounded like different kind of laments caused by different kind of stomach aches, and lyrics have the intensity of Sesame Street opening credits song), singers sucked ( some of them probably assumed Viagra or Cocaine, I even saw one who, while being interwied, started greeting people he recognised among the audience and told stories about Balkans that had no connections with the interview itself); the vice-presentor ( a 1m tall dwarf wearing enormous shoes with the colors of the Italian flag) touched between the legs and without any apparent reason the Director of the First Channel of Italian public television that was sitting among the audience; the idiocy of the two super models that usually jointly assist the presentor, this year ended up causing interferences with cameras, thus obliging the authors to alternate them.
My favourite performers so far are called “Frank Head” or somethig like that, they ARE che link between man and monkey, they cannot sing, they cannot dance, they don’t pretend to be human. Someone sincere, at last.
Stargate
In the last few months I’ve been having the strong impression that, somewhere in Rome, a Stargate must have been unlocked allowing freaks from other galaxies to reach our planet. In the next days I’ll try to provide you a list of my favourite aliens.
The Astracan Grannies (furwearingus mummys) : if you pay attention, you’ll notice that streets, markets and buses have been invaded by these creepy creatures. They’re not very dangerous unless you don’t become an obstacle to their only task, which is to carry all day long heavy flowerpower shoppers from a side to the other of town. Anyway, it’s very easy to spot them if you know that:
- they all are 1.40 mts tall
- they all wear astracan fur coats. Astracan is a kind of mythological sheep with a curly and shiny fur, that is now extinguished (a little like dodos) because in 1920’s someone decided it was “the new mink” and not even the WWF was able to contrast nowadays grannies will to be à la mode.
- they wear last generation sneakers.
- since their only goal is to bring mysterious shoppers all around the town, you can often find them in the subway or on the bus. Now, when I told you they aren’t dangerous, I also added that they aren’t dangerous unless they don’t perceive you as an obstacle. For example, if you didn’t notice one of them has got on your same bus and you walk towards the only free seat, they could even punch you in the face or throw you out of the bus in order to win the seat.
Murphy’s Law or Weekend in Bari – Episode 2
Sunday
On Sunday my teenage sister broke up with her boyfriend. That couldn’t sound like a big deal for you, but it’s just because you don’t know what does being engaged when you’re 16 mean, in Bari. When you’ve been dating someone for let’s say, more than one month, you can already consider yourself engaged and this is true especially for teenagers nowadasys. While I still belong to that cute generation of girls who consider a chewed chewingum the most romantic pledge of one’s love and affection, my sister got for the “First Month Anniversaire” an Ipod. Moreover, as you start dating someone, you are automatically introduced to his whole family up to the most ancient granny’s aunt. Even though I’m sure that it doesn’t always work this way, my memories of my Pugliese mother in law still scare me. Maybe she didn’t like the fact I used to get dressed as a flea market had fall on my head, maybe she didn’t like my piercings, maybe she wasn’t very comfortable with the fact that at that time people at school thought I was a satanist, dunno, really. Anyway, I always sensed some kind of negativity coming from her, maybe because she used to meet the nuns ( did I ever tell you I attended a school ran by nuns? creepy people, really, they thought greek and latin till they were 80, after that they would retire in a farm in a village called Noci ( which means Nuts, can you see the beauty of it?) waiting to die….wwwwwh) in the school basement and spend their afternoons preparing Aloe potions and sorting out a way to defeat the devil in me.
Anyway, being engaged in my hometown is a pain in the ass, and it’s a hard work too, and I guess this is the reason why people get engaged when they are 15 years old and then just get married with the same person. I guess they reckon having an affair it’s easier.
So, now, you can understand why breaking up with V has been such a terrible experience both for my sister and us. Given the fact that I’m the working sister and that she’s the pretty one, we had given for granted that, sooner or later, V would have marry her thus relieving us from the what-the-hell-is-she-going-to-do-when-school-will-be-over? issue.
Now gotta, go, she’s calling me on the MSN messenger for some advices, and I gotta read very careful what is she saying, since the overuse of emoticons make the chat box look like a Picasso painting. God I’m old.
Snow there, spring here..
“It seems we swapped weather with Europe!”
Ziad, Damascus
“Thank you for the warm regards, we really need them in the snowy and cold weather we have now in Jordan!”
Victoria, Amman
by Zainab Hamoud
M.
GF8 Transgender: communication experiment
This post ain’t about Gf (Big Brother)8 trasgender participant (beautiful-lady-Bambi-eyes-super-smart-much-more-womanish-than-me-screw-her called Silvia). If you ended up on this post lookin for her, well, too bad for you. This post is in fact a serious meta-communication experiment. There is a nice tool called BlogStats, on WordPress, that mainly tells you how many clicks does your blog get every day, and which Tags ( which is the XXI millenium name for “keywords”) are the most frequently searched in the Net. Checking out my BlogStats I found out that the second “top post” ever has been M’s one on the Italian Big Brother new ( and suprisingly smarter than usual) participants. Deepening the research, it came out that tags such as “GF” “Transgender” were often associated, in the websearch, to words such as “transgression”, “easy” and stuff like that.
So my little experiment will mainly consist in publishing this post, that says nothing at all about GF8 nor about transgenders, with the same tags M used for her post. After that I’ll just wait and check the BlogStats every two hours and let you know.
Now, you may think I’ve got nothing to do. From your point of view it could seem true. I work for an association that gathers Radio and TV broadcasters from all over the Mediterranean and links them in the organisation of conferences, co-productions, festivals and so on. My job mainly consists in making sure that all of them are able to fly from their hometown to the place an event is taking place (let’s say, Bucharest) and that they can enter the Country the event is settled in ( let’s say Romania) without being arrested for lack of Visa. After that I have to make sure they have a place to sleep in, one to eat at ( possibly not the same) and, sometimes, act a little like an idiot to make them laugh ( for example singing Adriano Celentano’s “Azzurro” in a restaurant in Alexandria, while wearing silly phones with a microphone as I was Britney Spears).
In the last days I’ve been waiting to know if I gotta go to Romania and fight in person with Howard Jonhson’ General Manager for the bloody room release policy, after I’ve already spent last week doing that on the phone ( but in the end I guess that staring him in the eye and miming what i mean could help, since I’ve tried badly to let him understand me in english with no success and looks like Rumanian general managers have serious problem with the subject-verb-object concatenation).
Now, the thing is that my colleagues and I make every day huge efforts to make people understand the richness and the beauty of this Mediterranean enlarged world we live in. This blog as well is about that, and the idea that it has been visited mainly by jerks looking for sum hot stuff about Big Brother transgender, drives us nuts.
For this reason, this post is a very serious experiment about the avarage IQ of this blog’s visitors. I’m afraid to know the results. I’ll let you know.
GF8 trans-culturale e trans-gender…ma la trasgressione è il milanese simpatico!
“La casa non è un gioco”. Con questo slogan, un gruppo di giovani – pare appartenenti alla Fiamma Tricolore – ha preso di mira e danneggiato la “bolla” trasparente del Grande Fratello allestita a Ponte Milvio, a Roma, per il lancio dell’edizione 2008 (lunedì scorso, 21 gennaio) del Big Brother in salsa italiana. In quella bolla erano stati rinchiusi, per un paio di giorni, tre candidati-concorrrenti in ballottaggio per l’ingresso. L’assalto ad una bolla…un’impresa donchisciottesca. Una guerriglia ancor più improbabile poiché condotta sul terreno stucchevole e mediatizzato del Ponte dei Lucchetti.
Ma lo slogan mi intriga. La casa, anche quella del Grande Fratello, in effetti non è (solo) un gioco. Anche per chi non lo ritiene luogo di interessanti esperimenti antropologici, questo reality sicuramente amplifica modalità e messaggi, sdogana personaggi e comportamenti. E li serve alla tavola del pubblico famelico (la serata di apertura ha toccato punte di share del 44%…)
Quello che c’è lì dentro in qualche modo ci riguarda, anche se non ci rispecchia. E soprattutto non ci piace. E allora ben venga se gli (anacronistici) ever green del coatto romano, della bonazza napoletana, di Mamma Carmelina e Papà Filippo quest’anno sono accompagnati da un giovane barista brasiliano, un affascinante e poliglotta ingegnere libanese e una truccatrice transessuale risolta e serena. Dopo edizioni un po’ troppo sopra le righe, dove volgarità e ignoranza riempivano il vuoto di storie e personalità, quest’anno l’impressione è che si sia optato per un mix umano più garbato e sano, in cui la componente “altra” e “trasgressiva” è meravigliosamente normale.
La timidezza del brasiliano, l’eleganza e i congiuntivi perfetti del libanese e il sorriso pacato e materno del transessuale: in questo paese ancora imbrigliato in facili stereotipi, questi sono gli elementi davvero trasgressivi dello show 2008. E per quanto mi riguarda – vénghino, vénghino, Ladies and Gentlemen!! – il milanese simpatico!
M.
Caramel – Women’s levity worldwide
A week ago we went to the movies to whatch a film M. had heard about. She’d kept telling me about that all the way from the office to the cinema, so as we bought the tikets I was dying to see that. It was while I was buying pop corn ( so what? It’s corn, it’s healthy, it’s like bloody corn flakes, it’s not like junk food. I don’t do junk food. Not very often, anyway) that we realized the film we intended to whatch was called “Cous Cous” while the film we were going to whatch was called “Caramel”, of the Lebanese Nadine Labaki. Well, guess what? It was beautiful. We spent our night in the cosy atmosphere of a beauty salon where the lives of women cross and melt like the sugar they use to do the wax.
The movie is settled in Beyrouth, but it’s not about Beyrouth. The women protagonists belong to the arab world, but there is no anger, nor politics, nor Coran it. It could be anywhere, because the relationship between those women are universal, as women relationships always are. So bravo, to this young ( and gorgeous) film maker whose levity has been already prized with a candidation for Oscars 2008, bravo cause she proved that Europeans ain’t the only one who are able to make a sweet, sensual movie about women.
