December 17th 2023
Lenin
I am sitting on the train, waiting for the next station. I am again in the Restaurant, trying to get myself at ease as the time goes by. It is sometimes hard because I am not accustomed anymore to the sounds of a small bar, surrounded by so many people, one so different from the other. There is a group of four German youngsters. I suppose they are German because they are expressing themselves in the local language. I however got the feeling, listening to their accent, that they are second generation immigrants. There is a huge gap between them and the idealized people imagined by my fellow leftists. The latter are really deprived of a grasp on the real world, they cannot feel what the populace needs and are so different from the skilled intellectuals who managed to subvert the soul of the Russian people. With those youngsters I would hardly manage to establish a dialogue and bring them on my side. Provided that I still want to do that. I think that they have been so deeply deprived of their spirituality, they would obey only to their individual interests and goals. A single page of Marx, of my short books, would be too much for their mind. Not to mention a whole masterpiece such as Das Kapital. Although I have already heard that joke, so well widespread in the former Soviet Bloc, “There are communists all around the world because nobody had the will to read Marx”. I read it and was fascinated by his discussions, but I must admit that I was an impressionable young man without experience, moved much more by personal greed and desire for revenge. I needed only something complex enough to make magic with.
The are dealer
Kenny Schaf with his moodz and faces is hitting the market once again. He is brilliant and I need to pay him a tribute sooner or later. I love the expression on his face, but it is quite hard for me to get totally enthusiastic when I do not feel enough variance in the output. Sometimes his work is repetitive and it makes me sceptical. Perhaps I should focus more on the dynamicity of his colours and shape. Invader is thus an artist of much higher level, as for instance also Katherine Bernhardt is. To get a good understanding of street art, I like to visit from time to time the Internet site of Purling. It is a premium maker of chess boards and other games. The company involved several well established names to give colours to the chess pieces. Among those, Sophie Matisse, granddaughter of the celebrated painter. She created a chess set dedicated to Alice in Wonderland that makes me dream of. Apparently it is not the single chess set that she created. Chess and art had always been strictly connected since the times of Duchamp, but perhaps even before . From the other artists of Purling’s team, I also approve of Sickboy and Lhouette. Both of them began their career with the suburban areas of the great European metropolitan agglomerates, just to end up in the sitting rooms of some awkward petit bourgeois who needs to strengthen his ego by making a purchase.
The consultant
Thinking back about my grandfather, and his friend the Graf von Pazze, they came back from the Island of Corfù in the late 1920s. They did not actually come back, because both of them chose Italian nationality and moved to Rho, just outside of Milan, where I also grew up. I felt ashamed of my birthplace, and over the years I always pretended to have a totally different hometown. Playing on my German surname, I sometimes said I was born in Como, in Vienna, or even in Rome. Imaging to belong to one of those German families, of art dealers and critics who moved from their heimat to Italy with the precise goal to learn more about the Renaissance. On the contrary, the Graf von Pazze and my grandad created a chemical company, conceived with the purpose to create energy from the litter. At their times it sounded like an alchemist's quest and perhaps it was. The Graf von Pazze spent most of his days together with Belle Helene’s father. Who was, as I will also repeat to myself, a mix between an excommunicated priest, a wise man within his community, and an eccentric polymath. My grandad sustained that most of the chemical formulas at the base of their business, had been created during the long conversations between the Austrian aristocrat and the Greek philosopher. The Belle Hélene preferred the company of my granddad, who however kept with him the Heidi’s. I remember that by reading his daily notes, they read together the novels imagining that one day they would have lived on the Alps together, under the same roof. By reasoning around all those circumstances, I understand that I should not travel to Moscow, but to Rho and recover, from my family’s chest, the diaries kept by my grandfather during his whole life.
