domenica, novembre 16, 2008

'Gomorra', fuck, it's even a great title

This week will be busier than I'd like, starting with today, but it's for a good cause because, as mentioned, we're running off to London tomorrow. Yaaaaaay! Nonetheless, today I have to tell you about not one but TWO new favourite things:

New Favourite Mobster Movie: Gomorra, by a fucking landslide. Shows those people as the lousy parasitic cunts who'd fuck their own mothers they are. I've been feeling quite strongly about this lately - probably started a couple of years back, post-season four, when I realized the Sopranos had turned into well-shot lifestyle commercials and didn't have anything to do anymore with the psychology of men who are worthless enough to decide that sort of life is for them. Or maybe it even started 12 years ago when I went to Calabria for the first time as an adult and realized what these sorts of organizations do to their own country. And it's been getting stronger with the last year because of some things with my family and some things with work, because those people are all wrapped up in the economic organization of Italy, which we cover for the magazine - without shame, with impunity.

Suffice to say the tidy, surgical precision of the way bad guys only killed bad guys except when there was some sort of dreadful mistake in The Godfather and similar such was starting to feel like the biggest whitewash since the medieval gentry managed to convince themselves they were chivalrous because they serenaded aristocratic women in between raping the peasants. Gomorra isn't like that. At all. It's excellent - textually, and also aesthetically - very good to look at in a gritty way and very nice music from Massive Attack.

New favourite Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel: Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Holy shit. It makes the Metamorphosis look like an ode to social cohesion. Wow. It was so good that I can't find ways to describe how good it was, but that's never stopped me from trying before, so, well, it was a ripping good read, and an utterly convincing literary universe despite being so short. And it should be mandatory reading in all civics classes.It had the unusual merit of being so convincing, as mentioned, but at the same time contriving to feel very much like an allegory of something - but of what? And the action of wondering, 'what is this an allegory of?', sort of forces you to realize it's an allegory of everything - of how we shy away from some of our more confusing duties. Ah, I really can't describe how good it was. Just fucking read it. 128 pages, you've got nothing to lose.

Nessun commento: