When you think about Paris, first thing that comes into your mind is of course the Eiffel Tower, but the second one should be a flock of couples almost making out all around. Well, you’re not that wrong. Paris is the Sweethearts Capital, but it can also be much more than this. Last weekend M and I went to Paris at our friend C’s and, even if we’d already been in the Ville Lumiere more than once, it had been able to surprise us as if it was a completely different town we were visiting.

C. lives close to Place de la Republique, and I couldn’t imagine a better neighbourhood for him to live in, as he - who’s in love with the Arab world, or, at least, with the Arab food, the Arab tobacco in the Arab pipe and, of course, the Arab women -  can find there many kebab restaurants ( the smoke coming from the windows smelle greasy enough, but I wouldn’t swear that the brown stuff turning round and round was actual lamb meat …well, only the braves…) and even a Hammam, a Turkish Bath, to spend the afternoons at ( unless you don’t like mushrooms…neither to drink nor under your feet).

 Saturday morning we met P for breakfast ( trip tip: if you’re Italian and you can’t start your morning without an espresso, you’d better ask for a café serré, or you’ll end up depressed, forcing yourself to sip dirty hot water from a huge cup, that will automatically lead you to the closest toilet to eject what you’ve just ingested…let’s consider it some kind of natural colonscopy ). P is a handsome, smart middle-aged man with an astonishing predisposition for foreign languages, and he entertained us with jokes in German and Greek as we relaxed in a small café, lazily staring at a mill-run that made the whole scene look as if it was settled in Amsterdam. When one of the waiters started to fight with the clochard that has permanently settled in the cute, fancy kiosk right in front C’s apartment, we decided it was time to go, so we left Amsterdam and headed towards Paris Indian quarter.

P brought us in a super weird roofed street, where we walked for a while taking thousands of pictures to carnival suites shops and to huge papier-maché Indian elephants. There were also many Afro hairdressers, and grocers that sold varieties of fruit we couldn’t recognise, and the everything looked and smelled of India in such a way that you could expect a baboon jumping on your head all of a sudden.

Regardlessly to our stomach we asked for some original French Tandoori chicken and basmati rice, while a young guy tried some scarves on in the shop en face, jiggling as P gave him suggestion to the colour that better suited him.

Life can be a mess, but if you are in Paris, you don’t care.

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.

Whatever can go wrong will go wrong,

 and at the worst possible time,

in the worst possible way

Saturday

I went back to my hometown ( Bari, south of Italy, right in the heel of the boot, just in case you didn’t know) for the weekend. In the avarage stereotype, the weekend at your parents’ is a golden time when you basically are feed, dressed and hugged all day long. Well, in the beginning it actually worked this way. I spent a beautiful Saturday with my mother: we had breakfast in a super awesome coffee shop, then we went shopping ( I bought my 20th pair of boot. Maybe I should stop, but they costed only 15 euros, can you believe it? How couldn I leave them all by themselves on that crappy shelf? ), then we went to a beauty farm and did sauna and a relax massage. For dinner we went out to a very nice bio restaurant and had smoked salmon, and angus steak, and an awesome slice of orange flavoured cheescake. Can you image a better day? I can’t. After such a perfect day I decided to go out for a beer with my best friend D. and his girlfriend so I drove with my mom’s car till D’s and then we went downtown with his car looking for the rest of the gang. After half a pint I was ready to go to sleep, but I parked my car at D’s, and so I had to wait 01.00 p.m. before reaching it. I love driving back home at night, smoking my last cigarette and singing my head out listening to Virgin radio. Everything is nice and calm as I drive coasting the sea. As I drove across the rails and turning right to reach my street, I realised all of a sudden that a car was driving against me reaching 200 km/h speed and with its lights turned off. I sheered desperatly trying to avoid the impact, thus ending up in a flower bed and scratching my mom’s car against a wall. I tried to explain my mother that she should be happy because her beloved daughter is safe, but I’m pretty sure that, if it wasn’t for the insurance, she’d lovingly kill me.  

Good thing about life, it’s that it surprises you in ways you couldn’t even imagine.  Im my last post I wrote about this communication experiment, that consisted in “fishing” web perverts with tags about Italian Big Brother’s transgender participant and then count how many of them ended up in a blog about Mediterranean culture looking for something juicy.  Well, I must admit they’ve been pretty much, but there’s no wonder in that. Jerks’ mother is always pregnant, as we say around here.

However, in doing this little experiment, I had to check frequently the Search Engine Terms thing, which is a window that makes a real time report of through what kind of search people end up in your blog. Among all of the transgender hunters there was one query that really surprised me: “How do people from Rome look like”.

Now, we have the chance to do a job that makes us overcome every kind of stereotype ever invented, as we meet every day people from all over the world thus having the opportunity to know how they really are, beside the Coran, the veil and the couscous. What I mean, is that we learn to classify people in “nice”, “funny”, “jerks”, “idiots”, “good workers”, “bad workers”, “bad breath”, “aweful shoes”, “can’t understand a word of what he/she’s saying”, “sleeping beauty”, “retard”, “hunk”  indipendently from the Country they come from or the God they worship. I mean, If I take a look over my laptop, I’d see the funniest and sweetest  girl  ever ( but I’d better don’t stare at her too much, since every time I look at her she makes the printer fall, or tries to feed me with bananas saying I’d better eat a little more fruit. She’s some mix between the Tazmanian Devil and my mother and that scares me) . Her name is F, and I notice that  she’s a muslim only when it’s Ramadan and she starves while the rest of us sips regardlessly hot chocolate. Well, I guess that our point of view towards the “others” doesn’t represent the avarage’s, but anyway. If someone feels the need to search the web to find how do Romans look like, that could mean that:

- He has never read Asterix. Real Romans still look like Centurioni, beside the fact they don’t wear those feathery helms anymore  nor those nice steel skirts, and that’s a pity, because some Romans have really nice legs though a little hairy. Well, they could always wax, couldn’t they? They speak like Centurioni (putting an e at the end of every word: bar = bare, tram=tramve yes= yesse), they stomp on your feet in the subway like Centurioni surely did, they are rude, loud and during Sunday football match they would be able to kill a bull with their bare hands if the referee acts unfairly.

- He has never seen 60’s movies: Romans are handsome, swim in the fountains with Anita Heckberg, drive Vespas and slap in the face people on trains.

- He has never seen The Gladiator: Romans look like bitchy Australian actor and, before doing something very annoying ( like fighting against lions), they always grab some dust from the floor. For this reason Roman’s wives are very happy, because they don’t have to clean up the house: the dustier, the better.

The thing is, that we still need stereotypes to understand the world around us, even if we don’t even have to make any effort in creating them: the world changes faster, things are getting more and more confused, and Media help us out in organising our knowledge. Now I gotta go, I’ve plenty of things to do: wearing my Armani coat, driving to the Pizzeria with my Vespa, drink wine with friends and maybe play a little my mandolin.

“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.

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.

“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.

On January 19, the Secretary General of Damascus Capital of Arab Culture 2008, Hanan Qassab Hassan, launched the festival during a large ceremony at Al Assad Centre for Culture and Arts in the Syrian capital.
President Bashar al-Assad, the emir of Qatar, the Turkish president, former Lebanese president Emile Lahoud, and the Arab League’s secretary general Amr Moussa attended the official inaugural ceremony together with top officials.
Since 1996, the Arab league, through the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (Alesco), chooses a city each year to receive the title of Capital of Arab Culture, whose objective is to show the riches of Arab culture in the arts and literature.
Damascus is going to host several events this year, like theatre, cinema, music and dance presentations, publications, as well as conferences and discussion groups with Arab intellectuals. One of the most awaited events is the show by Lebanese singer Fairuz, who will make six presentations at the Opera House, starting on January 28. The event organisers also intend to bring several other artists from the Arab and non-Arab world. Among the guests is North American linguist and thinker Noam Chomsky and Czech writer Milan Kundera.
News on Syrian Arab News Agency (Sana)
M.

L’espressione di sicuro non è universale, ma il concetto sì: esiste un luogo - più della mente che fisico - in cui una donna si sente bene, in cui l’uomo è un freak da scomporre e vivisezionare, in cui le frustrazioni si ridimensionano e i problemi tradiscono il loro lato esilarante, in cui la tragedia si sfilaccia, la lacrima è terapeutica e la risata contagiosa. E’ il Club del Bigodino, nelle sue più varie declinazioni: intellectual-chic, gossipparo, psicanalitico-solidaristico, sadico-giustizionalista, femminista-girl-power. O tutto questo insieme. Comunque sia, è quel momento di riunione, quella piccola galassia venusiana, in cui ci si scioglie in un grande Noi e si riduce “the rest of the word” ad una bizzarra presenza con cui bisogna pazientemente convivere.
Danze di Baccanti, sabba di streghe, piccole donne attorno al pianoforte, casalinghe disperate o single disinibite a Manhattan: sempre e ovunque le donne hanno bisogno di donne per sentirsi pienamente donne. L’istinto competitivo ed egocentrico di Eva contro Eva lascia il passo ad un sentimento di sun-patheia avvolgente e imprescindibile.
Letteratura, cinema e televisione hanno dato (e stanno dando sempre più di frequente) volto, parola e colore a questa dimensione, sfruttando il potenziale di profondità ed ironia che un gruppo di amiche affiatate sa mettere in campo. Le atmosfere calde e disperate di “Tutto su mia madre”e “Volver” (Almodovar ha da poco prodotto anche una serie televisiva, “Mujeres”, ambientata in un appartamento di Madrid), quelle fashion e dissacranti di “Sex and the City” sono solo due forme - a loro modo estreme - di questo stare-insieme primordiale.
Ho appena visto “Caramel” di Nadine Labaki, giovane regista franco-libanese candidata, con questo gioiello di film, all’Oscar 2008 come Miglior Film Straniero. Un salone di bellezza di Beirut, cinque donne, le loro vite. Attorno a questo vivace microcosmo - reso ancora più dolce dalla bellissima colonna sonora - si srotolano vicende private e grandi (eppur comuni) interrogativi. Intensa leggerezza, riso amaro, confusa determinazione. Una complessità affascinante quanto faticosa che lascia l’uomo - spesso - a guardare da fuori, attraverso la vetrina..

“Cambia il vento ma noi no” canta la Mannoia interpretando parole di Ruggeri : istanti di complicità con l’altra metà del cielo…

M.

Pare che il libro della scrittrice svizzera Johanna Spyri sia il testo più tradotto al mondo, dopo Bibbia e Corano; medaglia di bronzo che si contende con “Pinocchio”. Heidi ha sedotto il pubblico dei più piccoli, rassicurato i grandi, intrigato i cultori di quel meraviglioso mondo, assurdo e (a suo modo) perfetto, dei cartoni animati di fattura giapponese. Quando un fenomeno ha dimensioni del genere bisogna chiedersi cosa c’è dietro. Quali archetipi mette in scena, quali universali emozionali tocca, quale alchimia di familiarità e sorpresa riesce a generare.
Ogni prodotto, di creazione o materiale, capace di “funzionare” indipendentemente dal contesto culturale, geografico, sociale, temporale in cui viene inserito ha è in sé elementi assoluti e primordiali che puntano alla radice di ciò che siamo e, dunque, di ciò che vogliamo e amiamo. Il boom dei format televisivi ne è la dimostrazione seppure, per molti, in termini di deriva e mercificazione del meccanismo: individuare l’ingranaggio seduttivo e moltiplicarlo all’infinito, riducendo la creatività e il senso del messaggio a puro make up e marketing.
Ma Heidi conserva la sua innocenza: è nata ben prima di quest’epoca cinica e pigra, senza la malizia di chi, pur di parlare a tutti, non dice niente, pur di piacere a tutti, si fa multiforme e inconsistente.Heidi era straordinariamente avulsa dalla realtà già il 7 febbraio del 1978, quando apparve sugli schermi di Raiuno per la prima volta. Pascoli erbosi, caprette, una Svizzera spartana e allo stesso tempo edulcorata, giochi semplici e sentimenti puri. Pubblico potenzialmente attratto da una tale cartolina: apparentemente minimo. Eppure la piccola pastorella è piaciuta a tutti. Una pennellata candida sugli anni plumbei. Heidi è l’entusiasmo dirompente dell’infanzia, senza se e senza ma. La Signorina Rottermeier la rigidità polverosa delle regole dei grandi. Iperbolico, pop, e clamorosamente efficace.
Oggi ha trent’anni e sta vivendo mesi turbolenti. Già diventata un gioco in scatola negli anni ‘80 e un videogame per PC e Game Boy - e ora anche compressa in una raccolta di 10 DVD da poco in commercio - è stata pubblicata, a novembre dello scorso anno, dalla casa editrice turca Karanfil con un vestitino lungo e castigato che sicuramente comprometterebbe le sue allegre corse con Peter. Ad occuparsi della sua educazione a Francoforte, la Signora Seseman e la severa istitutrice con hijab e ampi vestiti. Un cortocircuito estetico e culturale che ha provocato dure polemiche da parte dei media turchi e una chiara presa di distanza da parte dello stesso ministro della cultura che aveva inserito Heidi fra i testi consigliati alle famiglie per l’educazione dei bambini. Cavalcare il potere seduttivo Heidi per sdoganare un messaggio politico e religioso. Una strumentalizzazione che parte dalla consapevolezza della capacità di questo personaggio di toccare le corde profonde dell’immaginario, di creare empatia e contatto con il lettore o lo spettatore.   

A 30 anni Heidi sta lottando per rimanere se stessa. E ce la farà. Si sa che l’aria di montagna tonifica.

M.