The city of "A" circled

A chat with the history of the counterculture Matteo Guarnaccia in Milan: his music, his many lives, his characters, its decadence, its hope.

Can not remember who said it, but he was right: "Milan is a city that shows your ass out," that the bad things, the sad face and gray are the first things you notice about her. Beauty rather keep it hidden in the yards ... but its confidential nature. Crystals of light inside the door, outside is a dark stone.
Milan intrusive, obscene, vulgar cumenda of the present day, is a Milan that violent. What he forgot to have a genius loci water, hidden and restless.
When we talk of Milan as the capital of speed, fast paced, we do not know which is a city that comes to water and water. It is no coincidence that fascism is opposed to this idea of cross contamination and burying the canals.
The water is water that flows in Milan to prevent things rot, not stagnant, it runs the mills, turns ideas, brings to people.
Now you need to re-discover these true aquatic roots, opposite the roots underground, all the water is moving.

An "Irregular" almanac
–- Heartfelt and beautiful, the man who is talking to a lot of passion in his city is Matteo Guarnaccia. Historical passion, illustrator by trade, libertarian for reason and feeling. Matthew is a noble artist, as when he painted when he writes, the world passed us by its scale and returns it as a weapon to wake up in the future. You can define a visionary who grasps the hidden side of things, in this sense Matthew has put together, with Giancarlo Ascari (known to comics fans as "Elf"), a great visionary work in Milan.
is a few months in library and attracts the eye if only for its shape. Reminiscent of a nineteenth-century almanac illustrated, with images designed and built for the occasion, the graphics are original and at the same time a bit 'of yesteryear. Reactivated a form of yesterday, unable to peel off in Milan Croppi of this obscene and speak today of a city very difficult. Is this - because I, like the writing of this paper, I live in Milan - a perverse and fascinating city, a city vital and off, a city where we will wander like ghosts, with the feeling of being unwanted bacteria but also the acid fermentation, mold making yeast. On the threshold of that great site of the worst (sperem) the best that will Expo 2015, the two old acquaintances - Elf and Guarnaccia - make the point, throw ironic barbs and trying to revive pride popular Milanese.
It's back page after page , Pino Pinelli, Milano, Primo Moroni, Camilla Cederna, Ivan Della Mea, of all the heretics of all faiths, and ever renewed attempts always cleared of occupations, battles for (and) camps, to spaces of freedom and dreams.

A dictionary which already had two entries under A so anarchist could not find space on these pages.

Matteo says
I think of Milan as a revolving door that has allowed many people to find themselves and build alternative worlds. Now that Milan would like to become a barred door, enclosed by a fence to defend. But anyone who knows his history knows that it can be. So I Elf and we dealt with the roots, so badly used that word! But it is not an act of dissection and autopsy of a corpse, Milan is not a corpse, if anything, is a city zombizzata.
It happened already several times during its history that there was a moment of total stasis, but from time to time some were enlightened bourgeoisie and the working class to save the city. Currently there are more workers in Milan, the brutal reality is this. Once the workers are gone, they had a well-defined role of balance, Milan has had to lean completely on the other side. When in the 50s and 60s were driven from the center of the most disadvantaged, have given way to nothing, banks and offices. The heart of the city die every day at six in the afternoon, so the middle class has run given up and gone elsewhere.
These two classes have taken it with him disappearing mediation that Milan is a great value.
Already in the late 800, after the disaster of Light Beccaris, the bourgeoisie took charge of offering answers to an explosive situation, you could not think that the starving would continue to be gunned down ... so did the hotels and soup kitchens, have made a number of secular institutions in which people are not going to ask a favor, which was not charity, but where it was going to learn a trade and become independent. The promoters of this major project were socialists and anarchists, to some extent even the Masons of the time, and it was very important to the Jewish bourgeoisie of this city (Prospero Moise Loria, founder of humanitarianism, not to make a name ) ... all without them there would have been fixed in the cavalry Piazza Duomo and the city would inevitably be impoverished.
Today, Milan is one of the lowest points in its history, intermarriage seems the only hope to cling to restore the soul open.
The foundation of a city-wide mythology is always the work of a stranger! Are not those of the place founded the town, they arrive a few foreigners, like Aeneas to Rome. So today in Milan if we expect a new foundation can we expect from foreigners.

Another recent paper by Matteo Guarnaccia the counterculture with DVD and CD provided tasty and testimonies of those who were there.

Amphibians Characters
–Then that's two writers, painters, illustrators, cartoonists ... two characters as amphibians Matteo Guarnaccia and Elf are looking for with the history of their city, tells the extraordinary creative course between dancers and booksellers anarchists, hippies, gangsters, bohemian soaked Absinthe, a noble bit 'crazy.

Amphibians very much and is very Milanese, suggests Buzzati painter and writer and Savinio painter, writer and musician, the amphibian world is very close to Milan and is one of its most absolute wealth. Amphibian was a character like Gianni Sassi, a brilliant graphic designer and provocateur, who put up a record label that the Cramps (Area, Finardi, Rocchi ...). Sassi, however, had a consciousness of his work, all the ambiguities of advertising, had learned his lesson situationist. Next and after him have made space a series of figures that have embraced the imagery to the market, turning it into a circus for a fee. The imagination has lost its revolutionary potential and has become illusions: "Give me your eyes! you mistake, you witch ... and I take away your wallet! "
The lower classes live enmeshed immersed in an imagination that belongs to their owners, they try to live like them, dress like them, have lost all forms of solidarity, they hate themselves and the misery of their neighbors.
Ours is a book that wants to wrest power from the imagination. The choice of tables set out by us has been specially made for dozens of books that tell Milan have the same repertoire of images. Our work aims to provide new tools to see a city choir, full of characters unknown or forgotten, unredeemed ... not the big and little or revolutionary martyrs, but the newsagent Augusta anarchist Piazza Duomo, CT ahead of its time that the writer warned the "people" bull by the "church that kill by the wave," the noventenne Gagliano lurking to slap the priests on the street, anonymous souls that make up the fresco from the bottom of this nonsense we call a meeting place Milan.

Stramparloni and social centers.
One of the characters around which the book is based Primo Moroni, of a certain singer who goes from bad Milan, the extreme left, anarchism. From him I learned to really tell, and ... to brag! Because the only way to make a collective history is to account not only the news but also of oral literature, ways of saying produced by a city. Our book continues a tradition that Milan is told by the bar, a restaurant, but ... [the words of the stramparlone Hrabal] alas race from extinction.
This book is a catalog of characters, groups of agit-prop, but also a map of half a century of occupation and community centers in Milan, not to track the resistance of a sixty-barricadiera hard to die, but to talk about places that have made the culture in Milan and Italy. The contemporary musical culture is born in social centers, places where they were able to develop speech and sounds that had no right to citizenship elsewhere. Today, the community centers are places in crisis, and it feels! It is criminal that there is no space for music, a guy who wants to start playing where it goes? It's all basic education that is carried out.
In the '80s - the years of reflux - with the spread of heroin in the city, many cultures sought refuge in the province of Milan to save the situation ... but now that the province is the cradle of racism and web links to the worst mass-aspirations , there is imprisoned lives and snarling, saved from what? probably by themselves ... while Milan for good and evil continues to maintain its indomitability. Maybe, I hope, with this book we could do something useful at this moment, this moment in which Milan is the epicenter of the disaster ... but if the ransom is not starting from here, there is no other place in Italy that can handle the new mutation.

Alessio Lega
alessio.lega@fastwebnet.it