In memoriam of Marco Pannella

Since I heard the new earlier today, I've been trying to collect my thoughts and my emotions with regard to the passing of Giacinto (his real name, I never completely forgave him for betraying it) "Marco" Pannella. I'll try to express them in the lines that follow.

To understand the greatness of Marco Pannella we need, of course, a bit of historical perspective. We need to remember an Italy that was under the double servitude of two churches: the Catholic one and the Communist one. In an eerie symmetry, "the only true freedom is serving Christ" and "the only true freedom is freedom from need" kept echoing and reinforcing each other. It was to this Italy that Pannella brought the message, almost unheard, that individual freedom does matter, that it does matter whether people are free or not to decide about their love life (he fought for the right to have a divorce) or their child bearing decisions (he fought for the right to have an abortion). Later, he campaigned for the right of consciousness objection to, and the abolition of, the mandatory military service, for the legalization of drugs, for the rights of the LGBT community, for the rights of prostitutes, for decent living conditions for the inmates of jails, for the importance of rules and limits in the life of the State and, in particular, in the administration of justice. He wasn't the originator of any of these campaigns and, of course, he wasn't alone in them. His genius, on the contrary, was his ability to offer himself as the symbol, the embodiment and the charismatic leader for the inspirations of entire categories of people who, otherwise, would not have found a voice. The Partito Radicale I knew, and for some years was part of, was a wonderfully diverse collection of weirdos, originals and outcasts of all sorts. Just being in it all together, being able to give a political expression to our being different each in his or her own way, was already a political victory of sort. Some of the battles we fought together are now so much part of today's common sense that they sound almost trivial. Other, like the legalisation of drugs, are only now entering the main stream. Some are still as much radical now as they were back then.

To his genius in choosing the most groundbreaking contents for his campaigns, Pannella added a probably even greater genius in the choice of his methods. It is difficult now, after witnessing the antics of Berlusconi and Grillo, to remember a time when the democratic discourse in Italy was made inaccessible by its own grayness and by the boredom it never failed to provoke in whoever tried to develop an interest in it. I'm old enough to remember when the only TV political programme was "Tribuna Politica", practically "Question Time" without questions. Political discourse was either totally devoid of content or contained only coded messages from politician to politician, expressed in the most obscure of jargon. To this depressing landscape, Pannella brought his hunger strikes, his appearances at "Tribuna Politica" with a gag on his mouth to protest, ironically, for the lack of TV exposure, his acts of civil disobedience, his verbal intemperance, both in quantity (he could speak for hours in Parliament) and tone. It is easy now to lament the parody of this political showmanship we see in the less capable and less responsible hands of Berlusconi and Grillo, but this should not make us forget how groundbreaking it was and how much it helped to bring to attention some truly progressive and, at least at the their outset, minoritary campaigns.

A man always so groundbreaking in his thought and action was, inevitably, also a man of many mistakes. One was bringing organisational chaos to the Partito Radicale at the very time when, with the Mani Pulite anti-corruption judicial campaign, it could have become the receptor of people's anger, as instead was the Northern League. Another was his misjudgement of Berlusconi, in which he wrongly saw a liberal. And there was the (so paradoxical for such a libertarian) authoritarian way in which he lead the party. On more personal note, this was the reason why I once clashed with him. I went to the party's national conference and I (a very young new member) decided to collect signatures for a change with regard to some small, but to me meaningful, mechanism of internal party organisation. I took the mic (in front of 3,000 people and live on national radio) to illustrate my proposal and found some appreciation in the audience. At that point Pannella took the mic himself and attacked my proposal with the very strong tones he always used. My proposal, of course, at that point was crushed in the vote. I was, however, proud to have been defeated by such a giant and the experience gave me a precious insight into the mechanisms of authority and charisma.

At the end of that conference, however, I witnessed a more positive, although equally scary side of that charisma. I saw Pannella's closing speech and I will probably never experience anything so powerful in my life. I felt as if I was attached with strings to each and every of his words, as if he was playing me like a fiddle. I was, even, responding to each and every of his gestures, pauses or changes in tone. I looked around and noticed that the same was true for all those around me. I felt grateful that a man with such communicative powers had decided to campaign for sometimes hard to sell liberal issues, instead of just exploiting populist fears and prejudices. If he did, he could have been a Mussolini (fortunately Berlusconi and Grillo, although populists, are much less capable).

That speech, however, was closed in such a beautiful and uplifting way that I forgot all my fears. Pannella raised his hands to the sky and promised to his audience: "With these hands we will keep reaching for our dreams!". So, thanks, Marco, for reaching out for our dreams with such formidable hands. May the rest of us keep doing so for long.

Back in my days - a short story

Back in my days things were much simpler. You never think you will become old enough to hold that thought but, if you are lucky, you do. Only now that I'm turning 80 I can understand and accept it as a fact of life. As a still relative young man (of, let's say, 45, in the period before oil ran out) I was arrogant and impatient with people who couldn't keep up with the times. Truth is, it was all due to luck. As a kid, back in Italy, I had stumbled upon the first "home computers" and took a shine to them. It could have happened with chess or stamp collecting, but chess and stamp collecting didn't change the world, while computers did. I found myself on the cusp of a wave I rode it as long as I could.
I wasn't as lucky with the next wave, though. When the first Personal Genetic Synthesizers became available I was simply terrified. What if, I thought, I make a genotyping mistake? The young replied that technology poses problems but also gives the means to deal with them, and they went on happily genotyping away with their agile tentacles, which of course they had self-mutated for that very purpose.
Then the Interwet came. At first it sounded like a joke, but every technology takes from the previous one the metaphors it needs to imagine itself. Back in my days we took the world of ink and paper and we imagined the email, word-processing, the pages of the web. The pioneers of the Interwet just went a step further. I don't know who first though that the metaphor of something "going viral" might be pushed to a completely new level, but the first real virus to carry a message in its DNA simply spelled "QUERTYIOP", which was clearly a homage. Now each of us is an Interwet page, in which messages of all sorts replicate, fight each other, mutate, move to other pages across increasingly contagious links.
As an old man, I still don't know what to make of it. What I do understand, though, is that every technology is a response to the fear of death, it's an attempt to achieve some permanence: the pyramids, writing, the press, computers. As a young techno-utopian I once dreamed that digital technology could give us immortality, that we could upload ourselves onto an everlasting cyber-paradise. That dream came to nothing but, just like with waves, soon every broken dream is followed by a new one. As skeptical as I might be, I don't have any other option than trying to share it. The end might be near, but may these words (and with them all the other words I ever wrote or spoke, all my thoughts and my memories) long live inside your bodies.

On sacred art

All sacred art can be seen as a piece of evidence against the existence of God. If he really existed the simplest praise would be enough, just like the Graal in reality would end up being a humble wooden cup. All these beautiful Cathedrals, Requiems, Divine Comedies and Paradise Losts, instead, remind us of the need to dig into the the deepest veins of our imagination to cover up his silence and conjure him up from of his all too apparent absence. (Sorry, but I don't have a gig, I'm staying at home and I'm drinking beer while listening to Fauré, hence the rambling).

The Mirth of Sysyphus

I was thinking that for me a joke is just a logical thought pushed to its extreme consequences. At the very end of logic there is paradox, nonsense and madness, as many logicians learned the hard way. Or there is humour, which is the acceptance of this absurdity and the enjoyment of the wonderful ride it can offer. It's the kind of defiant acceptance that Albert Camus saw symbolised in Sisyphus, the mythological hero who was forced for eternity to push a big stone uphill only to see it falling back again. Of Sisyphus Camus famously wrote: "One must imagine him happy". Or, at least, one must imagine him laughing.

Wagner, Sadowitz, Stanhope

Just finished to listen to "Tristan and Isolde", an opera I love but that always puzzles me. What puzzles me is, in a sense, how we can survive it. I mean, it's such an powerful condemnation of morality, convention and even society itself, such a radical celebration of passion and desire at its most intense, uncompromising, self-destructive intensity... we love it for that reason, we listen to it fascinated and enthralled and then we go back to our restrained, rational, bland lives, to the same conventions, morals and society that the opera denounces so powerfully. Isn't art, even the greatest art, a failure? Isn't it completely impotent to change our lives?

The same type of question (and maybe a hint to an answer) can be posed in my opinion by the comedy of Jerry Sadowitz and Doug Stanhope.

Let's start with Sadowitz. Watching him live (and you can only watch him live) is one of the strongest experiences you are going to live as a spectator of any art. It's like if somebody took one of your internal organs, let's say your liver or your spleen, and put it on a table for you to observe. You would probably feel a certain repulsion and disgust, but you would also have to recognise that it's a part of you after all, even if a part you normally prefer to forget. Sadowitz's jokes, in fact, are always extremely unpleasant, they seem to draw from a level of our being that it's too deep and too ancient for morality and civilisation itself. It's a level at which we are misantropic, misogenic and racist not because we believe that's right (there is no belief and no right or wrong at that level) but because we just feel threatened by everybody and everybody is an enemy. Sadowitz behaves and looks like a man completely dominated by his Id, in a sense he is a monster, but a monster that is also us. We laugh at his jokes because we feel reconnected to a level of ourselves that is normally forgotten and repressed, a level that is actually what we built our civilasation against. Civilsation, we know from Freud, has its owns discontents and Sadowitz allows us to take a little vacation from them. Which doesn't mean, of course, that we leave his shows less civilised, more misanthropic, misogenic and racists than we were before. After a vacation normally we stil go back to work. But this does not mean that vacations are pointless either.

Something similar happens while you watch a show from Doug Stanhope. If Sadowitz forces you to face your Id, Stanhope forces you to push your intelligence to its extreme, iper-rational and sometimes  paradoxical consequences. To admit, for instance, that abortion is the best solution to global warming. After leaving his shows you will probably still compliment your friends for their new babies, but again you will have enjoyed a vacation from the limits that decency and morality always pose to the free exercise of our rational thinking.

So my conclusion is that Wagner, Sadowitz and Stanhope will never change our lives but, by offering respite from its constant restraints and limitations, will at least make it more bearable.

A dream of ghosts and languages

Strange dream last night. I was talking with an unidentifiable friend and with my paternal grandfather when my paternal grandmother passed by, said something and left. It all looked normal at first but then I remembered that she had been dead for a long time. I started to discuss how that was possible, suggesting that it was probably a collective hallucination, when my unidentifiable friend switched to English. I realised it was to protect my grandfather, who probably had never realised that my granny was dead (in reality he's dead too, but in the dream either this wasn't the case or it was irrelevant) and who couldn't understand that language. My grandad started to get closer and closer so I said to my friend that what we were doing was actually cruel: he had serious hearing problems and now we were giving him the impression that he had lost the ability to understand us altogether. And then I woke up

On the purpose of comedy

The more I think about it the more I feel convinced that in comedy the medium of laughter is the message. I mean, when people laugh is because for a moment they are enjoying seing something in a completely unexpected light or are experiencing the temporary lifting of a taboo or are discovering that something they thought peculiar to them is actually shared. This list is of course incomplete, but the point is that all these experiences are highly valuable per se. There is no need to say anything more and, most importantly, nothing more being said will ever compensate for the lack or paucity of these experiences. Call me a formalist, if you want (or call me a cunt, if you must).

Facebook killed the blogging star

Just to say that if you want to know how the Fringe 2012 is going for me you should better keep an eye on my Facebook profile.

And then the last days

Here I am, back in London. As always, the end of a Fringe run leaves you with a feeling of emptiness, but I'm also very happy about the experience. The last three days have been very good, with audiences that really seemed to love the show. On Saturday we did the recording, my performance was a bit more nervous and imprecise than what had become the usual of late, but I got some big laughs. Yesterday before the show I had the feeling that it was probably a day too many, but the show itself went very well, it was a good way to finish. I think this year I learned a lot, in particular I developed my performance skills, becoming much more relaxed, free-form and interactive. I know recognise that the reviewer who last year described my performance as "stiff" might have had a point. Challenging yourself is a matter of balance, too little and you learn nothing, too much and you learn nothing either since you're too terrified to experiment. Last year I never felt free to try new things, which instead is something I did in abundance this year. And I was quite stimulated in terms of the writing too, in fact my set at the end was five minutes longer than it was when we started. Not forgetting that I really liked performing with Alice and Cecilia, who also really did very well. Yesterday Alice was suggesting the possibility of doing a London "postview", so maybe we'll do the show once more, but to be honest I think we all feel much stronger and ready for new challenges. My own challenge will be to try to transfer as much as I can of my newly found performing confidence to my next one hour show. For what the writing is concerned, I have a lot of ideas buzzing in my mind, I'll start trying them out as soon as I have a chance. And for all of this I need to thank again the fantastic audicence we had in the course this month, even when the numbers were small they were always ready to laugh heartly and to love this show. I love you too.

Strange days

Indeed they have been strange days. After two weeks of almost constant good audiences we have been hit by abysmal numbers, mainly due to the fact that we had finished the flyers. Yesterday we decided not to flyer at all in order to save the few remaining flyers for Saturday, when we'll record the show. As a result we had five people in, so today we decided that flyering was essential and we got 1,000 more printed at an extortionate price. I did a hour of flyering and the other two did the same, so we were quite shocked when only a couple turned up for the show. We were telling them that we were going to cancel when the Waitress arrived. I talked about her on Facebook, normally this blog is all about comedy, there is no reference to my "private life". Thinking better, this also happens to be true for my comedy. During this festival I had some emotional "turbulences" and, for the first time, I included some references to them into my set. I realized with surprise that this was an absolute first and how "disembodied" my comedy had been so far. I don't think I'm going to turn into a confessional comedian, but there is probably room for talking a bit more about what makes me happy or makes me suffer, beside what tickles my cerebral cortex. Moreover, it's very difficult to keep comedy and private life separate when you have only three audience members, one of which had been the subject of some semi-serious romantic fantasizing over quite a long string of traditional Scottish breakfasts. So we decided to do the show anyway, in my case mainly because I didn't want to disappoint her. She seemed to enjoy it and we had an absolutely lovely chat over drinks and a long walk to her bus stop, but she didn't want to come to dinner or to another show. To make things more complicate, I had started thinking and writing about her mainly as a potential source of comic material, intrigued by the idea of a "love story" where everything happens within the strict limits of an exchange of orders and food between a client and a waitress on one side and within the much less strict limits of the client's imagination on the other. The fact that she really came to see my show and that we went for a drink for me was already a cross-over between fantasy and reality almost as surprising as the one in "The purple rose of Cairo", if you have seen the film. Have the walls started to crumble? Is it life that is trying to get into my comedy? Or is it the other way round? I have done quite a lot of comedy this month, I'm afraid that "doing" a bit of life too will be the only way to find out.

Mid run blues

The delay in my upddates reflects the feeling that the last few days have been quite uneventful. When you do a long run the mid of it is probably the most difficult moment. You don't have the eagerness (and the fear) of the start nor the energy rush of the last days. The show is in its shape and although it can still get better the biggest improvements have probably already been achieved. What else can we get from this show? A second review would be nice, but free collective shows are probably at the bottom of every critic's pile. And Saturday we're going to record the show so a good recording would be nice too. And I need to remember that every audience members sees us for the first time, there is no mid run blues for them. I'll try to feed on that thought.

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A day with a sold out!

Apparently the God of the Fringe is listening to my prayers. I was hoping for a lesson on how to deal with a much bigger than expected audience and, hey presto, we had just that today. The content of the lesson, however, was a bit disappointing: apparently all you have to do is standing outside of the door during your show partners performance while turning people away, which of course was heart-breaking. I hope some of them will try again tomorrow, but doing my set in front of a packed and very reactive (although, thankfully, not in hacklery kind of way) Saturday audience was just great. They welcomed every single joke with big, warm, understanding laughs (yes, not just the pissed kind of laughs: I know what you were thinking) and they were very generous at the end with their applause, compliments and money. Yes, just great.

A day when nothing special happened (all details below)

Yesterday I felt highly energetic all day, maybe because it wasn't raining. I'm starting to think that the mood boost offered by the weather conditions is all relative: a covered day without rain in Edinburgh gives you the same boost as a sunny day in London or a pleasantly breezy day in Italy. I did a lot of flyering and at the end I was a bit disappointed by the audience size, but they were very appreciating and we had a good gig. Our performances seem to have become constantly good.

A day with a good audience and a relatively good review

My blog posts seem be to like our show, at least according to the review we got from ThreeWeeks: the title says it all. Yes, I know what you want to know: it's a three stars. As I said, it's relatively good one: Cecilia treats the audience with "some beautifully quaint and charming acoustic music", Alice is "exuberant and perfectly pitch" and my "academic" investigation into language is "at times fascinating". That's all I got: five words. And I find really strange that, out of the three of us, I was the one to get the adjective "fascinating". But we can't complain too much and the review refers to the second performance, while the show is much better now. And yesterday we had a very good audience in terms of size, at the beginning it was a bit silent but we managed to win them over at the end. Onwards and upwards.

A day of tiredness, rain and small audience

That was yesterday, I was even too tired to update the blog. Today instead I feel tired, it rains but I haven't done the show yet. It was such a change from the previous day. Probably the main difference it's that the rain didn't allow us to do proper flyering (which doesn't bode well for today). The title is really working, normally I get a big laugh with just repeating it, with 9 people out of ten thinking that they can be really original and witty by adding "You are the one from Slough, aren't you?". Sometimes it goes so well that I feel entitled to add: "If you are laughing so much now, think how much you would laugh at the proper show!". But all that is not possible when it's raining so we had six people plus my friend Adrian, who will never believe that I had a full house just the night before. He is here to share the flat with us for a week and I'm very happy about it, one of the reasons being that he was him who made me discover the Fringe (back then as a member of the audience and not particularly interested in comedy) five years ago. Considering that I was feeling tired and that I often don't deal well with small audiences I was really worried about my performance, but at the end I was happy about it. There was a moment when I let the show develop into a little discussion with the audience and it felt quite fresh and Fringy, if you know what I mean. Adrian found that I looked a bit pissed off about the audience size, but I was reactive and present and there was nothing of the "depressive" reaction I had on the first night so overall I thought it was a huge improvement. Can we move to the next lesson, Mr.Fringe? Maybe how to deal with an audience much bigger than than what you were expecting?

Two (days) for one (blog entry)

I know, yesterday I didn't update my blog, but the latest two days have been two tickets for one in the paid for venues so here is a two-for-one blog entry. Actually that was a concern in my mind as somebody running a free show. If you had a week or less at the Fringe, would you choose to see a free show, that is always free, over the rare opportunity of a two-for-one offer? Maybe you didn't think of it, which is exactly the reason why I'm mentioning that offer only now that is finished. It's all fine and dandy to bare my heart in this blog, but I need to ask myself: how is what I'm saying going to affect the show? Focused, I need to keep focused! Ok, now I'm exaggerating, but at least you understand how you feel when you are promoting a show at the Fringe. Fortunately that worry seemed to be unjustified, since we have a very good audience yesterday and a great audience today, with big laughs all the way through. Today at the exit a promoter from Wales asked me for my details, it was that kind of good. It was the "I wish there was a reviewer in the audience" kind of good (no, that review hasn't been published yet). It's my first year in Edinburgh when I don't have the impression of going in circles but I can see my performances going steadily better every time. It's too early to say that it's my best year, after all I can still break a leg due to the unlucky combination of well wishing friends plus a God that doesn't understand the concept of metaphor, but I can easily say that it's the best first week I ever had.

An (almost) perfect day

Was it really four days ago that we started the show in front of two people? Today I had to move twice to make room for more and more audience members. At one point Alice looked me and asked: "How did that happen?". You never really now, but it was probably a combination of the rain, the cumulative effect of the heavy flyering in the past three days, the festival getting into his full throttle and maybe a bit of word of mouth. And we didn't waste this opportunity, we had a very rewarding show. The day hadn't started that well for me. While having breakfast in a café I had bumped into a German comedian friend of Alice who had come to see us the night before, somebody who never performed here but apparently is big in Germany. I made the worst possible error a performer can make: I asked him what he thought of my set. First he struggled to say anything at all, then he just said that my attitude was "too aggressive", while failing to say anything about my material apart from the truly deflating "you'll get better lines during the run". Now, a "normal" person in a "normal" situation would have probably forgot the remark, but there is nothing "normal" about the Fringe. It's such a demanding experience that your confidence is constantly exposed to anything that might even vaguely affect it. More than one person told me that there should be a counselling service for performers, and probably there is, but at least we comedians have a great advantage over other types of performers: we can say whatever we want on the stage and we can make a joke of whatever happens to us. This year I have decided that whatever affects me will find its way into the show, not only because it's best way to deal with it, but also because it's the best way to keep the show "true" to how I'm feeling in the moment. So I cracked the quite easy but at the end very effective line "I have been told that my stage attitude is too aggressive... by a German", got a big laugh and, with it, a fully restored confidence. With a big "Fragile" written across it, just in case.

A suitably manic day

Today we had the best show so far. The audience was decent in number and very nice, Cecilia and Alice were in great form and I found the right level of energy. I interacted a lot with the audience, got some big laughs and really enjoyed performing. Strangely enough I think I was helped by the crazy way I had spent the previous four and half hours: queueing to spend 5 minutes with a journalist from the Scotsman! It was in fact the day of Meet the Press I'm not exaggerating at all: I joined the queue outside Free Central at 1.30pm, when inside I joined the Scotsman queue straight away and I finally had my five minutes at 6pm! I was of course tired and angry of the total pointlessness of all this, but at another maybe slightly masochistic way I really enjoyed the experience. It's just amazing to see so many people, some in their scene costumes, spending so much time to have their chance to explain, for instance, that "Hitler - The Musical" was really a good idea (I didn't make it up, they were in front of me). It's a spectacle to behold, something like the canteen scene in Star Wars. And the atmosphere of camaraderie among the performers was really very nice. With the show starting at 6.30pm I had to rush to the venue straight after my five minutes of press attention, so I did the show and I then rushed to see another show straight afterwards (the always brilliant Alex Horne). As a result I had the first food of the day at 10pm, apart form a cappuccino and a croissant in the morning and an endless string of cokes while queueing (and while resisting to the temptation of the free beer offered by a sponsor, which I knew would not be good for my performance but which never the less contributed to the general gaiety of the situation). Now I will need to understand how to keep that energy, or summon it at will, without having to stand for four and half hours and getting high on sugar and caffeine every day for almost a month. Or maybe not.

Two shows and two reviewers in one day

Yesterday I was wishing for more energy and more pressure and today my wish was granted. First in the afternoon I took part to Ivor Dembina's "Desert island jokes", a panel show about comedians' favourite jokes and what makes them funny. It was a very enjoyable experience, I particularly like the way the audience were involved in the discussion. In the audience there was a reviewer from ThreeWeeks, although I wonder how you can review what was just a discussion. Then I did a lot of flyering, helped but the good weather. And it worked: the audience's size was much better than yesterday. And fortunately so, given that in the audience there was a (different) reviewer... from ThreeWeeks! Are they out to get me? Weird being seen twice in a day by the same the same pubblication. ThreeWeeks claims to review every single show, I have always been sceptical, especially since they failed to review me two years ago, but now I'm starting to believe in their claim. My performance was much more focused and energetic than yesterday's, although some of the jokes got a smaller response than expected. It was some sort of highly demanding, slightly jaded festival audience. Oddly enough, at some jokes the critic was the only one laughing. I hope it wasn't some sort of very highly sophisticated double bluff, but it was a much better evening than the one they came to review last year (and Cecilia and Alice were very good too), so the only way is up.

First show done

Here I am, using a brief insomniac moment at 4.52am to catch up with my "daily" blog. So, after a very pleasant day as a member of the audience we had our first show. During the day I did some flyering, but I had nothing of the manic energy filled by fear and desperation that last year propelled me around Edinburgh like a crazy bullet. On one hand I was happy to have a more relaxed experience, on the other I was missing that energy. But maybe the God of the Fringe is already at work to find a solution. In fact, we started the show with TWO audience members! During the course of the show it went to NINE, a massive 450% increase. Both Cecilia and Alice did a sterling job with the human material at hand, to the point that when it was my turn I commented that if the Hammersmith Apollo had the same ratio of hilarity per person the theatre would literately crumble... "take that, Michael McIntyre!". They were both confident and focused and I was really proud of them and of the role I played in putting the three of us together. Unfortunately when it was my turn I had a lacklustre performance. It was a bit of a surprise since I was coming from three very good London previews. But in London we had big audiences, which always gives me a great boost. It's not the first time tI notice that I'm not that good at facing a small audience. After having seen a healthy audience in the same room at 2.45pm (so, no excuse there) I was really disappointed to see that our was much smaller and I probably never recovered from that disappointment. There are also some changes I can do to the material, in particular I'm getting too early into the language stuff, so I should introduce myself a bit more. But I'm very happy that Cecilia and Alice were in top form and enjoyed their gig and I'm even more confident that we have a lot of potential this year. And after this experience I'm pretty sure that, from tomorrow, that manic energy will probably be back.