My Internet life today
I spent a lot of time working on this site (the container, not the content) today. I am playing with the Semiologic theme for WordPress that Denis De Bernardy has created and updates pretty much daily. I find it fantastic and I highly recommend it. Denis is really good — and extremely gracious — in helping with the implementation of his theme, and in fixing any issues that might arise (in my case, mostly due to my clumsiness). The theme has the most amazing flexibility and it’s easy to customize and update.
I read some more women’s blogs; Burningbird on the debate on women, men, blogs, technology, and the value of linking (Shelley is very funny); Pause on women in business, especially when they go solo (Jory’s experiences and reactions are so similar to mine it’s almost scary). I love reading these blogs. I can see that I am not the only one with issues. If you have more suggestions on good women’s blogs please leave me a comment.
Jory has also an article on the May issue of FastCompany [I am Woman (I think)] about men and women’s values in business, and which ones are more successfull.
Men are pigs. So why try to emulate them in business? Women — and their companies — are much better off when they’re true to themselves.
Eddie is the best
I visited Eddie’s site today and found that he listed my site among his “I really like these peole” list of links. But he did much more. He added this comment:
Antonella is one of my favorite people I know. She’s also one of the smartest.
Hey, if this is not support I don’t what is. Thank you, Eddie, I love you back. Eddie is one of the nicest, supportive, and creative people I know. Here it is. You deserve it, Eddie.
Movies as backdoors to the soul
I love movies much more than I should. I find moments of greatness even in cheesy B movies. A few days ago I was watching Mona Lisa smile. which is not a good movie but has a moment that is worth the entire thing. In this scene, Betty Warren, the character played by Kirsten Dunst, is shooting angry insults to her “friend” Gysell Levy (played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, who I love) at the speed of a machine gun.
Betty’s world is falling apart. The perfect housewife life that she dreamt and obstinately built for herself is shattering, her husband of few months is already cheating on her, her icy mother sadistically denies any emotional support, and she has isolated herself behind a wall of pride and mean behavior. Gysell is the “bad girl,” sleeping around without apparently showing any shame for it, but her desperation is clearly showing up through the defiant surface. So, Betty is viciously attacking the easy target Gysell. Gysell at first tries to defend herself and attacks back. But suddenly, she sees through Betty’s anger and aggression and feels the absolute desperation behind the perfect and obnoxious surface. Gysell stops at mid-insult, gets close to Betty (for a moment you fear or hope she will punch her in the face), and hugs her.
Connection. When a movie manages to express honestly and powerfully the experience human connection or the need for it, I am hopelessly and lethally wounded.
I cry a lot at movies. It’s really annoying and kind of embarrassing. I’m such an easy target for sentimental clichés in movies. Sometimes I even cry listening to the news on NPR, when I drive to work in the morning (what an interesting view for bored morning commuters).
But there are some movies that hack straight into my soul through some kind of sentimental backdoor. They don’t just make me cry, they make me sob for hours after the end of the movie, and in the days following if I think of them. They lure me in with some laughs or some kind of hope or lightness, and/or some connection with my experience, so that I am completely open and vulnerable when they finally punch me right in the stomach and expose the total, desperate, naked need for human connection. Of course, there is some kind of harmonic resonance at work, so these movies might not do anything to you, even if you are emotionally vulnerable. For me, these are movies such as Edward Scissorhand, Amelie, Dancer in the dark, and Bianca (an Italian movie directed by Nanni Moretti, probably never distributed in the US). I am not even saying they are great movie (some of them are), they just have the power to dig a hole in my soul, like an alien probe.
Last night I watched another of such movies, Peter Del Monte’s Compagna di viaggio (translated in English as “Traveling companion”). The protagonist is Cora [Asia Argento] another defiant and apparently independent and free character, hiding a lot of raw and unresolved pain that surfaces as restlessness, anger, and self-destructive behavior. The movie has a light and sweet tone at the beginning, but its mood becomes much darker at the end. I was reading the (two) reviews on imdb.com and I realized how Cora’s behavior might leave the viewer puzzled. I didn’t need any lengthy and didactic explanations to get it; everything was brutally clear at a physiological gut level. I knew exactly how Cora felt when she jumped from the bridge or slept with men even when the disgust made her (literally) puke. Maybe I can understand Cora because I was raised in Rome, had a depressed mother, had problems establishing deep and reliable human connections, and learned the rules of sexual social interactions in Italy. Or because I just know, first hand, how people sometimes act up when they feel lost and isolated.
Confessions of a berry picker
I’ve just discovered Jory Des Jardins’ blog, Pause. I love it. I spent hours this morning reading it, instead of eating breakfast (impressive: breakfast is my favorite meal by far and I was actually quite hungry). It seems that everything she talks about is fundamentally relevant to my life. She is gone through what I am going through now. But she seems wiser, more insightful, and she writes about it so much better that I would be able to do. Thank you, Jory.
Talking about women and work, I found Confessions of a Former Berry Picker enlightening. It’s a little bit eerie to see Jory describing at the letter the pain I’ve gone through lately at work.
One thing that struck me is her description of the dissociation she felt between her well-adjusted well-behaved self and her Intuitive-self, and the inner debate continuously going on (I wonder if men are “more productive” because they don’t have to deal with multiple personality disorder all work-day long). One thing that she didn’t seem to experience is the pissed-off self. When I felt that my work was just an endlessly stream of tasks that a robot could do better then I did, I didn’t feel so much sadness as total furious anger. When I pictured in my mind discussions with my bosses, I was imaging wrestling matches. What happened in reality what so much sweeter. I found a lot of openness and willingness to listen on their part, and my anger melted away in about a nanosecond. Imagination (at least my ghost-filled imagination) could be so much darker than reality.
Trapped in a time loop
Today I had to look at Italian news online. I had just received “Cacao quotidiano,” a newsletter of “good news,” that is published daily the community of Alcatraz, in Umbria. Alcatraz is a rural community of progressive people where you can go to spend some time and relax, be fed wonderful food, and do unusual activities such as demential yoga and comic-therapy. At the center of the community there is Jacopo Fo, son of Nobel laureate Dario Fo, and his wife Eleonora Albanese.
Today, there were no good news on Cacao. Just a sentence: “We suspend the publication of Cacao, to grieve the great tragedy that has hit Eleonora and her family, and Jacopo.”
What happened, it didn’t say. But it was clear that was something important enough to be on a newspaper. And there it was, on the first page of La Repubblica. Eleonora’s father, Emilio, 69 years old, had been killed in a crowded square in downtown Naples, just as he was leaving the bank after withdrawing 3,300 Euro. The robbers probably followed him, then confronted him, hit him on the head, stole the money, and left him bleeding in the middle of the street. He died few hours later in the hospital. Eleonora made some furious declarations about the city and its inhabitants. “I cannot understand why my parents still live in this city. What happened to my father is not normal. Naples is ill, very very ill.”
But what caught my attention were other two front-page news. The first was the end of an appeal trial on a terrorist bombing that happened 35 years ago. At 4:37 pm of December 12, 1969, a bomb exploded in front of the “Banca dell’Agricoltura” in Milan. 17 people died and 80 were wounded in the blast. At first an anarchist from Milan, Giuseppe Pinelli, was accused of the bombing. He turned out to be innocent, but not before he “committed suicide” by fallling from the window of a police station in Milan where he was being interrogated. The bombing was almost for sure a right wing affaire, and several people from neofascist organizations were investigated. The trial moved from Milan to Rome, from Rome to Catanzaro, from Catanzaro to Milan. In the last 35 years different people were arrested, convicted, exhonerated, rearrested, re-convicted. In this trial, the last three people accused of the attack, and who had been previously convicted and given life in prison, were absolved and released. But the chilling part was that the relatives of the victims, still hoping for justice after 35 years, will have to pay all the trial expenses.
The second news got me really confused. It was the murder of two women, Maria Carmela Linciano and her 14-year-old daughter, Valentina. The murderer was Angelo Izzo. I remember Angelo Izzo, he was convicted 30 years ago for killing two women. He also was a neofascist, and with his buddies kidnapped and tortured two young women for hours before killing one of them and almost killing the other. The newspapers called him “il mostro del Circeo.” But wait, they were not mother and daugher, they were friends, their names were different, and why would the newspapers talk now about a murder that happened 30 years ago… It turns out that this was a new murder. Angelo Izzo, after 30 years, was released from prison; he seemed a totally reformed man and appeared really sorry for what he had done. That was six months ago. A few days ago, in a chilling replay of that day 30 years ago, he killed women again.
What’s happening to my country? It seems that Italy is caught in a temporal loop. Tragic events that have traumatized and infuriated us many years ago replay over and over again as in a nightmare or in a bad horror movie. Naples is still a very dangerous place. The people responsible for the bombings that killed hundreds in the ’60, ‘70s, and ‘80s have never being found, let alone convicted (and the relatives of the victims are paying the price, metaphorically as well as literally). Angelo Izzo still kills women. Can somebody break the spell, please?
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