Giugno è il mese del (Gay) Pride. Ormai viene accorciato. Accogliendo molti più “generi” di quelli immaginati in un primo momento, durante quel primo “ultimo sabato del mese” del 1970 a Chicago. Definito come una “manifestazione pubblica” ormai internazionale “per l’accettazione sociale e l’auto-accettazione delle persone omosessuali e il riconoscimento dei relativi diritti civili e legali”… il Pride è da sempre aperto a chiunque…
Uruguay 1980, the P2 Lodge, football and the Gold Cup (on TV)
Authoritarian regimes often used sports, especially football, for propaganda. For example, Mussolini did it in the 1934 World Cup, and was “copied” by Brazil in 1950 – except they lost the final match. Other times the kermesse is created out of nothing. This is the case of the Gold Cup played in Uruguay between 1980 and 1981. A basically useless competition, wanted by the deviated Masonic Lodge P2 and the Uruguayan dictatorship…
Horror movies, the fine line between trash and cult
Horror movies have been interpreted differently according to times and places or the filters created by a specific cultural vision. Sometimes they moved along the fine line which separates trash and cult, but somehow we all had to do with them. In the end, exorcising fear is an activity as old as humanity…
Environmental issues are not boring… (1)
Over time, environmental issues have been stereotyped a lot. Perceived as very secondary, almost useless. Apart from a few “green” fanatics. In the news they always reach the bottom, in the working world they are seen as marginal occupations, in daily life no weight. The sun, the moon, the sky, everything is still there as we have always seen it. At the end. These themes can attract compassion or mockery. At best a certain boredom… until something has been changed. Or not?
Well, the one on the left was on the right…
In Italy, the matter of what is the right and what is the left suggests the approach of the 5 Stars Movement or a famous song by Giorgio Gaber, who 20 years ago sang that the differences between right and left were already minimal…
Arpad Weisz, from the Championship to Auschwitz
News about Arpad Weisz ended in 1938, when Mussolini promulgated the racial laws. Jewish foreigners living in Italy after 1919 are forced to leave the country. At that moment, Weisz is at the top of his career…
Genoa, stingy and generous
Closed, cold, grumpy, but also tenacious, prudent, gifted… every great city and Italian region has its own, and these are the first negative and positive stereotypes that you hear about the Genoese. “Some are Sampdorians”, someone jokes. But above all they are said to be stingy (the famous “little short arm”), and at the same time, they are said to be generous… but the negative stereotype is often more famous! And that’s all the proof we’d need of the fallibility of the stereotype itself, being able, over time, to affirm everything and the opposite of everything…
Diary from a Roman quarantine… and a half
We are (almost) done. Maybe. And we are here to tell our point of view… without taking into account the deaths, the infected, the people without home or job, or both, the deep discomfort for a lost freedom, fear, uncertainty of the present and the future… we are “fine”. Even if this “emergency” seemed to regard only Italy in the “Western world”, we had the record of deaths. Actually all the world was involved since the beginning. It was just a matter of time. All the countries that lost time now have reached their “records”…
Coronavirus, how to navigate the confusion of data
An English study has recently claimed that there will be like 6 millions of infected only in Italy. Others say that they are now probably around 1 million. Everything is plausible, but most of the numbers that we chase everyday, fed by journalists, are only a guess that must be taken with a grain of salt. Especially today, every “expert” claims this while giving new data. So what should we look at to better understand the situation? The few certain facts and one deeper study that can give a far more positive perspective…
Coronavirus, a chance to walk on the other side
When the whole world was looking at Italy with worry, the virus was spreading everywhere else. This is because that worry wasn’t always “genuine”, but more often led by a stereotypical consideration of Italy, (one of) the“open flank” of Europe. With all the lack of controls and weak structures… (allusion by some news from England), being the country of disorganization and slowness “par excellence” (tacit from some French news). And this attitude came also from our debate. Is this disturbing? Yes, because it doesn’t tell the whole story…