Intersection of stories:

books with the voices inside.

There are books around that can burn the memory and thoughts to the future. History books and stories. Lived throughout history, so it can be told.
A friend journalist / editor (you have to do everything by yourself, now!), Checchino Antonini, I gave me one in the Turin Book Fair: "To you the stories of interest." I am interested in stories, in fact, I am interested in the testimony, I am interested in making an effort these days to return orality literature, to quit his role as academic, his daring buildings for the military in the field of testimony. Because then is not that much of an aesthetic choice: the idea is more beautiful and more real, and said Ivan della Mea.

“"On other days" (ed. Alegre, 13 euros) collects 10 stories by Stefano Tassinari, one of the most rigorous literary activities fighters. Stephen leaves for a while 'the frescoes in the form of yellow politician who have it made known ("The marks on the skin," "The love of the insurgents'), leaving aside the role of the narrator and demiurgic disappears behind ten items. Each of the stories that make up this beautiful book (and, even more than "nice", helpful, which is the highest compliment I can make a work of art) is told in first person by a witness or by the protagonist himself of the fact narrated.
Brian Jones, guitarist of the Rolling Stones rebel, along with its humorously delusional career, his unfortunately short life.

The agony of Carol Lobravico - actress of the Living Theatre - we handed over by restless memory of a warden of the insane asylum of Pozzuoli, where the poor found its absurd end, tied to a bed restraints. The narrator of this tale echoes the darkly deandreiano Pasquale Cafiero.
Salvador Puig Antich, the Catalan garrote anarchist in 1974, it freezes with the live of his last words: "Before I wrap the neck with a large iron ring, then an aide to the Executioner verify that my cervical vertebrae are perfectly positioned to 'height of the hole in the wood. Now everything is fine, apart from history, that is about to set out on a wrong path. Someone starts the execution. I hear the creaking of the wood, and then the creak of the screw that is starting to get into the trunk of the garrote, and the ring immediately after the cold begins to shake his neck, and then the tip of the screw that touches me the highest area of spine. Instinctively I try to draw back, but this kind of collar prevents me. Everything happens quickly, even if it seems to me the opposite. The tip begins to slip into the skin, while the ring, ever more closely, I reduced my breath. They are the last moments. I want to shout "Long live anarchy", but I don't have enough breath, and then I think it only. It is a moment: I feel the blood that bathes the back, the tip looking for a passage between two vertebrae, the collar that chokes me, the effort of the Executioner, the voices of the guards and the military judge, my complaints, physical pain , yet the blood, even the tip, even the circle, yet the blood, even the tip, even the circle ... crash. "
And so on, until you reach the penultimate tale where the narrator's voice - he had done peeps song about Bloody Sunday in Ireland - evoking the assassination of the Bolognese militant in Piazza Francesco Lorusso, performs a kind of psychological autopsy, a budget generation "until the obituaries in the newspapers will be too much to make us believe that even a generation." On this page there is a sense of the whole book. An intersection of lives that are stirred restlessly to the story, the unique ability of the voice, even then transcribed in the literature, to be alive, to say that something shining on the bottom of this night, the stars that died millions of years ago, yet remain as a movement of light to point the way for those going.

Finally there is a book (songs, writings, drawings, sculptures) on Herbert Pagani, songwriter, poet, painter, multimedia artist avant la lettre. The publisher has published Barbes in Florence (25 euros).
Apart from some website, so worthy as an amateur, in our country lacked any organic collection of this author, so dear to me from having dedicated one of the first articles of the book. This book comes to fill a void, and does so by bringing the precious attachment to a CD anthology.
We're excited to be able to compare it with vitality, sometimes desperate, but always a nomad of this revolutionary art. Emotion is always a regret to confront the many fine insights, but never deep with songs of this conceited author who has made history not only of Italian and French music, but also the run radio, inventing, at the beginning 60s, the trade of Radio Deejay Monte Carlo. It is touching to follow the path of this artist who debuted as a wandering artist, who gained success as an entertainer, who emigrated to France because he was a singer too busy to television audiences, who undertook the thankless task of supporting the libertarian Zionist position-with sincerity.
At the end Herbert, the boy torn from childhood sense of abandonment, inconsolable partisan of peace "in the absence of roots" had tried to "get their wings", went back to the painter and sculptor, closing words in the throat sadness and maybe stay for only 44 years old strangled.
The book that we finally have in my hands gives us texts and documents never reprinted or ground around the net, but the taste in the mouth of the opportunity lost. The parties are very analytical and a little biographical 'too small bone and the impression is that we are faced with a binder that was not dedicated the necessary editorial work to transform it into a book ... for a book - especially to' age of the Internet - should be something other than a site of a passionate collector.
Being a voice of Luca Pessina.

A completely different complexity presents an essay that starts from the figure of specialist Demetrio Stratos, the unforgettable voice of the Area, to develop a reflection on the bold vocal style.
Stratos parable in her short - just 34 years when she flashed him a lucem - developed an impressive use of voice, disengaged from the language to start a search on sound, the timbre, the vibrating body itself. In this research, in addition to vocal discs of AREA, Demetrius gave extensive testimony in a series of recordings of the second half of the '70s: "Metrodora" and "Singing voice."

Above all of these recordings has been questioned Luca Pessina in the book "Being a voice" (ed. Aereostella, 18 euros), making clear a path that makes the effort to Stratos its worth driving in the journey of reclaiming your body, understood as matrix of human sound.
The logos, speech, poetry, have subordinated the voice of the word, they removed the body and have relegated it to the role of the sole communication tool. In a society where information overload is strangling the man in the void of substance, the question arises of what the voice and even more of it is the voice. The journey to discover their own sound, your breath will appear as a founding act of self-discovery. Pessina's speech, under the aegis of Stratos, aims to re-appropriation of the body through the rediscovery of the buried item in our mute words.
This is eminently a book of philosophy, which reaches a moment of great intensity when recounted by the author's experience with a boy eleven years old with strong interpersonal and cognitive problems. In this part of the book seems to raise Demetrio Stratos, his enormous effort to create a project of liberation, which was with body becomes an existential and political - many years after his death - an essential support tool for a child who never Demetrius has heard of, but by means of Pessina, could benefit from research interrupted by the stupidity of heroic death, but remained here, help us all.

Ivan Della Mea. A new issue and examples.
Ivan Della Mea was an artist of essential. It remains a point of reference.
The poetic realism of his early songs, the ones of the time in which he lived, he knew and sang the epic disaster of the Underclass Milan (El my cat, the canson the desperate), it was time - the late '60s and early of 70 - with the subject of the revolutionary utopia visionary who took the body and soon collapsed (The Ship of Fools). In the more mature phase of his creativity was the theme dream become one with the anxiety of the future, love life was on a par with the omnipresence of death (Captain, Track 3). The shape in the work of Ivan had exploded: the songs had ramifications in the analysis of our time, the articles had become crock of alliteration and internal rhymes, his autobiographical books is akin to the cycles of ballads dedicated to Gianni Bosio I think ... in the coming years, the work of Ivan is still present if we want a compass to act with the words, with the guitars and voice in real life.
A few months ago appeared a collective volume: "Ivan's Mea. Un inedito e testimonianze. - A new issue and examples "(Jaca Book 18 euros) and half (80 pages) is occupied by a substantial novel written by Mea and for the rest of his testimony on the practice of intellectual incoherent Gianni Mura, Bermani Cesare, Enrico de Angelis etc..
The novel by Ivan "Icché" (a Tuscany for saying "that thing") is a tasty philosophical essay / political / biography as a letter (or rather email) exchanged with his friend Rosaria Parri philosopher. A hodgepodge of thoughts sometimes dark, sometimes filled with a joy of life and a child's laughter at the edge of nonsense, that people not familiar with Ivan struggles to reconcile with his image as a committed singer. Fragments of verse that I wonder if one day re-emerge even sung some unreleased tape. Episodes of a long life full of meetings that they had found a place in "When life gives you a slap" or "It happened to Tuscamelot" (published autobiographical books to life).

In short, Ivan Della Mea is alive and is fighting with us.

Alessio Lega
alessio.lega@fastwebnet.it