I tried, hard, to avoid writing about the US elections. I almost made it, but tonight I read this comment from Duncan and this one from Ben and I can’t hold it any longer, so here it is:

FFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKK!

Duncan writes:

Instead, it seems that we’re just as good at intolerance as anywhere else in the world.

And Ben writes:

I have spent most of my life understanding the mindset of many sides in debates, but no longer can comprehend the mindset of the other side. They are beyond me. I do not wish to be associated with these people. I want out.

I know a lot of europeans that ask me how I can stand living in the US. The states I ever lived are Oregon, California and Massachusetts. Look at the vote distribution: that’s how I can stand it.

Every time I enter the US, I get my fingerprints scanned and my picture taken. That’s 6 times so far. I wonder what they do with all those pictures: they compare it or they use it to train their anti-terrorist bayesian filters? It’s called ‘homeland security‘, it’s supposed to work well to keep evil people out. I have no evidence of that working, but I do have evidence about working equivalently well to keep good people out too.

This is the land of the free, they say, the land that changed the visa regulations so that journalists from foreign countries cannot go thru the visa waiver program, but they have to go to a US consolate in their countries to obtain a ‘journalist’ visa. There are only a few others countries in the world that require a special visa for journalists: Cuba, Syria, Iran and North Korea. I guess that in watching an enemy you learn a few tricks too.

This is an administration that decides to spend its money on weapons rather than on their people. An administration that believes that the richer the rich, the richer everybody gets. An administration that believes a number is enough ‘social security‘ and the rest is up to you. An administration that believes in peace imposed by tanks, in security by everybody owning a gun.

But what really REALLY REALLY cannot understand is the concept of morals: it is immoral to give people of the same sex the right to visit their loved one in the hospital, but it is moral to kill thousands of innocents to bring them your “peace” in exchange for a little oil.

I believed in the people of this country. I did because I know a lot of US citizens and they are good people. They are ashamed for what their government is doing. They love their country, they love the values this country was based on, the founding fathers, those who wrote one of the most long-lasting constitutions in the whole world. I believed it was the Bush administration that was a bunch of abusive criminals, I believed in those bumper stickers that read “regime change begins at home”.

Boy, I was wrong.

The majority of the citizens of the United States of America approved Bush’s conduct and awarded him with an even stronger administration.

I hoped for these elections to say a collective “we are sorry, we made a mistake, we are correcting it now” to the world. that would have stopped terrorism more than anything fucking tank or fingerprint scanner. That would have shown humility and recognition, instead of the usual obnoxious cockyness, a sign that the nation is watching, that those actions were due to an evil administration and were not the will of the people.

Well, as it turns out, they were.

The majority of the people in this country believes in the cultural superiority of the USA, believes that ‘money, civilization, technology and progress’ are objective measures of the quality of life, believes in religious fundamentalism and they are ready to kill for that. They think that falsifying evidences about weapons of mass destruction in order to invade another country is a reasonable and morally correct conduct. A nation that justifies the mean with the end.

It makes me wanna puke.

I have many good friends that are US citizens, I truly love them and I love what they love about their country.

But it’s now time for them to face reality: this country is not better than any other and would be a better day for the people of this planet (out and in the US) when it stopped behaving as if it was.

Living is easy with eyes closed… that’s how The Beatles song starts, but doesn’t really resonate with me lately, I’m much closer to “A day in the life”… I’d love to turn you on…

Went to New York this weekend. With Lauren to meet her brother Mike who lives there.

John Lennon was shot in Central Park. They now call it Strawberry Fields.

The big apple is a living organism. Decadent in some aspects, colorful in others. Fake and real at the same time, busy and laid back, cheap and fancy, so crazy that it’s unique, becomes a sanity of its own.

We went to the Guggenheim. They are rebuilding the MoMA so they moved it somewhere else… that’s why I couldn’t find the entrance in December! Shrug. Anyway, I just love museums of modern art. Well, I admit, some of the things exposed made you seriously think “either I don’t get it, or this is crap” (and my egocentricity tends to point me to the latter) but there were a few things that just impressed me: some for their soul and some for their minds.

There are two types of modern art, IMO, one contains tons of emotions, the other contains tons of reasoning.The first will be the one standing the test of time, the second, simply, won’t.

On the reasoning part: a piece named “Armageddon” composed of tens of thousands of house flies glued to a huge canvas. Disgusting but you can’t really stop thinking about it. Another one is called “Passport” and we were puzzled by the fact that it said “made by: endless stack of white paper. Please take one”. But there were none. Now, you might think that they ran out, but what if it was already empty and put there just to make you wonder? I mean, it’s called Passport. There should be endless passports right? it’s a piece of paper, right? you got the idea.

I’m still thinking if they ran out of paper or not.

Those are the rationally intelligent ones. Those who will dissolve as time dilutes them and their rationality will permeate the society membranes and become common sense, the emotionally intelligent ones will not.

I don’t like to read the plates in museums. If I have to read the plates, it means that the piece didn’t touch my soul. So, here we are wondering around until we enter the room dedicated to Umberto Boccioni, one of the most famous italian futurists and there is it Materia, exposed on the other wall.

Wow.

You know, there is something about human creativity that I can’t really explain: when something transcends its shape and your ability to process it and hits you straight, direct, with no semantic filtering and no crappy explanation of why this is good and cool and established… art is when you know this is cool even if you’ve never seen it before. Even if it’s a painting of a kid in an elementary school (which is no different from some Picasso’s indeed) or a huge building like this Frank Lloyd Wright’s one.

But Boccioni’s painting that kidnapped me was Visioni Simultanee.

Boy, they had to force me out of there.

Another thing about museums is that every time I get out I feel the urge to create stuff. I mean, I consider myself a software architect (that real architects consider an insult, ciao Vale!) and I do believe that aesthetic elegance yields better functional behavior (unlike the opposite), but software is soft! it’s not more noble because it’s abstract, it’s just a hack, a way to manipulate mental substance with less energy, but it always feels like a toy, even if you are trying to build the knowledge repository of mankind.

After the museum, we wanted to go see the new Charlie Kaufman’s movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but it was all sold out for the entire evening.

Kaufman represents to me the personification of the concept that emotional art emerges out of suffering. He is a genius. In the most completely disturbing sense of the term.

And every time I think about this it reminds me of Giacomo Leopardi, the italian poet and his poem “l’infinito”:

…
Immensity my thinking drowns:
And to shipwreck is sweet for me in this sea.

and I always wonder how many of the greatest artists would trade their posthumous glory for a happier life.

Finally my place.

I found this great place with two very nice roommates, Lauren and Marc and today is my first day! I’ve been abusing Ben and Mimi’s patience and incredibly generous hospitality enough and, besides, I just love the feeling that this is a place I can call mine. But they didn’t have wireless, so today I went to RadioShack and bought a LinkSys wireless router for 70$! Wow, these things are so cheap now. The installation was litterally plug and play, way cool. But then I had to search for a name for the network (since the default ‘linksys’ kinda sucks) and I remembered about the Internet Anagram Server came up with “ornamental surface” which is the anagram of Lauren, Marc and Stefano. Isn’t that cool or what?

I know, I know, lame posting today… but I had to try the wireless from all around the house and APGrapher kicks major ass about that. One day, in my copious spare time, I’ll learn how to program Cocoa in Objective-C and the fancy mach-o stuff and I’ll write a wireless grapher that speaks to you, so you can keep your laptop in the remote corner of the house and move around the access point while your computer on the other side of the house says “cold, cold, a little warmer, cold again, ah freezing” and so on while adjust it. Add it to the todo list.

I’m home alone because Lauren is performing this afternoon with her choir. Carl Orff: Carmina Burana. Guess what: lame as it is, “O Fortuna” is my favorite part. But I couldn’t go because it was sold out (Marc got the ticket in advance).

In the meanwhile, I fixed the bathroom too… probably I shouldn’t spoil those guys too much otherwise they’ll make me do all the little things, but gosh, I’m a geek, what can I do, I just can’t avoid trying to fix stuff.

Ah, “facchino smezzato” is the only two word anagram of my full name that makes any sense. For the non italians, it means “halfed porter”. Considering the area where I now live is called “Porter Square”, I consider it a good sign.

Or, more probably, if you look hard enough you can connect anything to anything else… which means my “it’s all about graph” theory go kinda wild if you think about many layers of ontological reification, but let’s not talk about that today.