Thursday 25 February 2010

did - elephant&castle photoshooot


Anrea Prato, DID, Elephant & Castle, London , Feb 10
davide de giorgi

Wednesday 17 February 2010

beautiful losers



when my youth was on fire (and my back in one piece) I used to skate. I went on skating for years in my legendary neighbourhood called "Mirafiori Nord" in the surprisingly quite pretty suburban area that crowns the Mirafiori Fiat factory. the grain of the asphalt was rough and hard to ride, there were no structures at all and we used to grind and slide pretty much anything with an edge. he board and the trucks were just not sliding without approaching the obstacle with a wild anger.
occasionally we were getting duplicates of VHS tapes from the unites states and we were gathering in someone's sittingroom to look at these pros. it was magical. we used to hear about these tapes for weeks before actually seeing them and it really was a "happening". I never agreed with my mates about who was the coolest guy in most of the videos, it was mostly a guy called Ed templeton. I was mad for him, to me he was using skate to communicate about himself. he wasn't particularly gracious or technical (compared to the others) but he really really really wanted to make the trick he was doing and he was ejoying it to the fullest. he really really wanted to skate and he was never showing off. tight trousers (far more than an outsider in the early nineties), sixties shoes and skating on pretty much anything with an edge.

I was pleased to find out that already at the time he was part of a fantastically REAL art scene that has been beautifully described in the documentary "beautiful losers" (2008). I extremely recommend it. to put it as IMDB.com does: "The greatest cultural accomplishments in history have never been the result of the brainstorms of marketing men, corporate focus groups, or any homogenized methods; they have always happened organically. More often than not, these manifestations have been the result of a few like-minded people coming together to create something new and original for no other purpose than a common love of doing it. In the 1990s, a loose-knit group of American artists and creators, many just out of their teens, began their careers in just such a way."


Tuesday 16 February 2010

agile, mobile, hostile



the real, underground, unpretentious rock and roll scene showed me a lot about life. it showed me that it works on his own rules and that these rules don't make sense/apply to the society as we know it. if you ask me, it pretty much goes in anthitesis with it. the more you are a winner, the more you get success, the more you kinda get away from the real rock and roll.
there's people out there whose life is a monument to all this.
Andre Williams is one of them. it's hard to describe him for me and that's why I really love the documentary agile, mobile, hostile. it's more than a documentary, is kinda like "some time spent with him".
it's far from a glorification. it's rough, direct and it doesn't give a strong personal poit of view.
you can watch it here. now. free.

few considerations and an explanation

this blog is to me a place to "mention" things that to me are worth mentioning.
if there's nothing worth mentioning I don't post anything. I hope this explain my silence since last october.
In november Karin and I got married and and it took me some time to understand what happened in me, how it eventually changed me and so on.
I didn't quite change a bit, probably because I was seriously ready to get married.
Anyway life is at least as good as it was before and couples of weeks ago I happily found myself scouting for bands again, binging documentaries, reading and playing as usually.
so far, a happy lad.
time to share and "mention" things again, good things are gone is back in business.
so, where were we?

a dear friend of ours, actually Karin's madame of honour, managed to capture the feeling of us two getting married.
so there it is, thanks Tiiu.


A dear friend from the other far side of the States managed to write a moving and deep portrait of me. It was a deep emotion and unexpected emotion for me to find this post on his own blog because he has always been a symbol to me, a scale to apply to the way I look at the world and an example of how a life is worth living.
he is to me a "real thing". not a copy, not a character, not an extra. a real thing.

I haven't seen him in years now, we just excange a couple of mails every now and then but I still know we're somehow walking the same path.
I don't know how and why he thought that I was worth a whole post, but I know that he managed to mention all the things I care about. So if you wanted to know more about the person that writes this blog. Click here.

thanks for listening.