This website has always been a field of experimentation, which hasn’t always had a positive effect on the way it looked, worked, or on the freshness and interestingness of its content. In the past few months I’ve tried to come up with ideas on how to make it better, by keeping eyes and ears open to what content-conscious designers were doing. I’ve been especially inspired by Craig Mod’s journal, which is by design more a collection of essays than a blog.
Now that I’m one of the beta testers of The Soulmen’s new creation, Daedalus—the writing app for the iPad I’m using to write this post—I find myself in a bit of a pickle. The reason is that I have too many writing tools, and still get way too little writing done.1
Not entirely true: between project briefs and project notes, memos for clients, and a certain number of tweets, I really can’t say I never write. ↩︎
Ten years ago I graduated from the University of Bologna. As a form of celebration, today I decided to copy the original video to my computer and extract one minute and twenty-two seconds of me trying to explain what made sense of my thesis. And repeating the word “musical” a lot. And moving my hands—I claim it’s because that way I could hide how shaky they were.
After waiting something like ten hours for my turn, after everything was over my vision seemed clearer, the air warmer, Bologna cleaner. I’d forgotten.
When I re-entered Facebook at the end of 2008, my intention was to use other services (Twitter above all) to funnel information into it, in order to minimize the time I’d spend on it. I’ve mostly succeeded, but even this low-investment approach has done nothing to improve my consideration of Facebook. I still think it feels like being in middle school. I’m not saying Twitter is necessarily better in that respect, but I find it a lot less aggravating, especially because it doesn’t want to gulp down every aspect of my life—digital and organic.
I’m realizing more and more how much I miss random walks when I’m at home, as opposed to when I’m traveling. And it’s not just the possible vacation time I’m missing. Of course I miss having nothing better to do than just walking with a cup of tea in my hands, but there is more to that: the mere idea of disengaging from more regular, desk-based work seems to boost my creativity. But the secret, I think, is to exploit this boost soon—possibly as soon as I get back to my apartment.
Two weeks ago I was driving a rented car from the Louisville airport to Cincinnati. Thanks to an accumulation of electronic equipment, I was also on a very clear Skype call to Italy—much clearer than the average cellphone call I can experience on either continent. I was so immersed in the conversation that I missed the right junction to the airport—twice, one time leading me into downtown Cincinnati, the other to cross the Ohio river into Indiana.
Naïve as it may sound nine years later, I’ve decided to translate into English the article I started writing for Terza Pagina on September 11, 2001. I’ve corrected only a few things, but mostly tried to be faithful to the original spirit. I like the rush and the bewilderment, and yes, I even like the raw quality of my thinking. The title is an approximation of the original. Literality of translation doesn’t really matter at this point.
Here’s “America who?”—enjoy.
I’ve been debating whether or not I wanted to publish this piece, after it didn’t make it to the first issue of Longshot (don’t click on that, I’m not in there). But why be doubtful? I knew what I was getting myself into. So here it is, with no explanations. Because you wouldn’t have gotten any.
It’s taken me a few months to finish reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan, but it was worth it. At first—especially while reading the first part of the book, about the industrial food chain—I thought the book was going to make me completely disgusted at anything I’d ever eat, but as my reading progressed I realized the result was quite the opposite.
I quit my first job after six weeks—not before threatening to do so in a couple of occasions—the day my boss came down to my office (announced by wafts of her mothball-smelling perfume) and complained that I was unwilling to let her reformat me. Yes, reformat, like a floppy disk (we still used those back then). That may sound funny, nine years later, but one must understand that I had gotten this job after responding to an ad in the most popular national newspaper, an ad that seemed to have been written precisely for me. The qualities were all there. The selection process was more than an interview, nothing short of an admission test, at the end of which I was picked among forty participants. I was proud of myself. But then I discovered they didn’t care about the skills, they just wanted to reformat me—and I was definitely not going to let them.