Category: Culture

In Review: CIAO is russian television, italian-style

Russians do love Italy, Italians, and Italian culture.

It can be easily proven by the fact that more and more Russian oligarchs buy houses in Italy (preferably villas near Lake Como). But ordinary Russians love Italy, too!

My parents, born in the 1960s, spent their young years listening to Toto Cutugno, Adriano Celentano, Eros Ramazzotti, “Ricchi e poveri”, Luciano Pavarotti, Andrea Bocelli, Lucio Dalla, Al Bano, etc. My brother and I grew up observing them change tapes of Italian singers at home or sing along to their favourite songs. And even though hardly any of them spoke proper Italian, they still had a lot of fun.

In the ‘70s, the famous Russian singer, Muslim Magomaev, sang “Bella Ciao” both in Italian and in Russian at different concerts. Since then, many Italian songs have been translated or adapted to Soviet/Russian listeners. As an early example, you can listen to an old beautiful cover of “Volare” by Helena Velikanova. For a later example, listen to how, in the ‘00s, Al Bano’s 1982 hit “Felicità” suddenly turned into a courtyard song “Where Can I Get Some Belomor?” (note: Belomor, or Belomorkanal, or Belomorcanal, is a Russian brand of cigarettes originally made in Leningrad).

Real Russians smoke Bell’Amor!

When I was little, I remember watching, with my mom – a huge fan of soviet cinema – the 1974 classic soviet comedy called “Unbelievable Adventures of Italians in Russia” (note: though it’s available with both Italian and English subtitles, I’d strongly recommend watching with a native speaker if you have one readily available). With its strange combination of slapstick humor and cultural insights, it’s a pity it is not as famous in Italy. I have a feeling this movie really showed a lot of our sympathy toward Italians, even though it was mainly portrayed with irony and through widespread stereotypes. We also watched a lot of Italian movies: “Madly in Love”, “The Taming of the Scoundrel”, “Life is Beautiful”.

Maybe these fragmentary memories can somehow explain the success of “Ciao 2020” and “Ciao 2021”, special New Year’s episodes of an extremely popular Russian late-night talk show hosted by Ivan Urgant. The show is called “Evening Urgant”, aired on the Russian federal TV channel called Channel One. The show is famous for interesting guests, funny jokes, good music and a relaxed atmosphere. Among foreign guests there were Billie Eilish, Jason Statham, Conor McGregor and many others.

To date, “Ciao 2020” gained 11 million views on YouTube, while “Ciao 2021” has 4 million views. Both these specials are set in an alternate universe of an Italian music era of the ‘80s, where all the Russian performers are dressed accordingly and speak only Italian. It seems Russians feel nostalgic about this sense of freedom from the 80s strongly associated with the Italian music scene. Older people like the show for its parody of Italian celebrities they remember from their youth, for the musical arrangements in which they recognize some of their beloved hits. Younger generations are attracted by modern popular Russian performers, humour, and the experience of something new, since the only alternative is to watch a never-ending 60 year old show called “The Little Blue Light” that looks like all the same singer-songwriter jokes on loop.

It is also worth mentioning that many Russians, including myself, are fascinated by the beauty of the Italian language. For me, the Italian language that participants speak on the show sounds exactly like my Italian after two years of living in Italy: strong Russian accents, messed-up pronunciation, completely ignored double consonants, errors in words’ endings, and word-for-word translations. Nevertheless, a lot of my Italian friends who have watched the show are still impressed and said they perfectly understood what was going on. And I must admit, it was a bold choice to use only Italian language by non-Italian speakers during the whole show!

Apart from a couple of racist and sexist jokes (the key here is to remember that it is a comedy show that tries to entertain and not to offend) there are some real gems in translation. For example, the name of the group “Dead Blonde”, with its lead singer from my hometown Arkhangelsk, was translated into Italian as “Bionda Morta”. This brings to mind the Italian expression “Gatta morta” (“dead cat”) referring to a woman who is a tease. Another is “Pippo il Secondo”, an interesting way to make the name of the Russian pop singer Philipp Kirkorov sound Italian. He is repeatedly called Pippa, which in Italian means unprofessional (or even worse: “farsi una pippa” is to jerk off).

It is also fun watching Italian celebrities trying to speak Russian. Not to mention another familiar face – Comrade Putin, himself – generated by neural networks to wish all Italians a Happy New Year, created as a parody of the annual Presidential speech watched by millions of Russians.

Moreover, practically all of Urgant’s shows can be individually praised for their great choice of music: they often invite largely unknown or up-and-coming singers to the “Evening Urgant” (his usual Russian late-night talk show). You can imagine how famous these performers become after being featured on this show. As a result, at the end of the year producers can analyse and choose the crème de la crème of musical acts for the closing event of the year “Ciao 2020” and “Ciao 2021”.

The legendary Devyatka VAZ-2109.

You can watch the whole show or just find individual songs you like on YouTube or various streaming platforms. Here are a few personal recommendations:

From Ciao 2020:

Crema de la Soda – Piango al techno (many stereotypical Italian characters on stage),

La Dora – Innamorata (a heart-breaking love song steeped marked by pastiche),

La Soldinetta, Vittorio Isaia e Giovanni Urganti – Chiesi io al frassino (every Russian knows this song thanks to “The Irony of Fate”, a soviet movie which we watch every year).

From Ciao 2021:

BIONDA MORTA – Il ragazzo con la giardinetta (in the original version, the girl brags about her boyfriend having a cool car, which in reality is the Devyatka, one of the cheapest in Russia; in the Italian version, the Devyatka is changed to a Fiat),

La Mia Michela & Eva Pollini – L’inverno nel cuore (a romantic song from 2000 which was recently covered by a more modern Russian group. Both singers, from separate generations, perform the Italian version together),

Giovanni Demetrio – Venere-Urano (a seventeen-year-old sings a simple song about a long distance relationship between Moscow and Saint-Petersburg; in the Italian version, the cities were easily changed to Rome and Milan),

Amore – L’Italia mia (a patriotic song from 2005, now about Italy instead of Russia).

As a Russian living in Italy, I can say that it is a very interesting and unusual sensation to watch these performances. On one hand, you have celebrities and songs you know as a Russian, sometimes even by heart, on the other hand you’re hearing them in a foreign language and in unfamiliar arrangements. Feels like these songs are rediscovered and, in some cases, you start liking them even more.

I believe this show is an intercultural phenomenon paying homage not only to the Italian language and music scene of the ‘80s, but also to all of Italian culture.

From Russia with love, indeed.

December 1, 2021
The Ruins, or Reflection on the Revolutions of Empires: and the Law of Nature

Another day, another ruined capital of another all-but-forgotten empire. The world is full of ‘em. Although Italy certainly has more than its fair share: Rome, Venice, Naples, and even Ravenna—where I happen to find myself this afternoon.

I stand before Dante’s tomb and read the long-dead poet’s words out loud and speak of the Florentine exile’s dream of a new, Christianized Roman Empire. In his political essay, De Monarchia, Dante imagines a world in which an emperor and a Pope check each other’s political and moral consciences. I wonder if the poet were living today and here to witness my audience of American university students, would he feel vindicated or ashamed of his eight hundred-year-old utopian dreams?

The students standing before me are a mixed bag. Some lag behind the group with significant reluctance. They roll their eyes when the prolix art historian begins her rapid-fire descriptions of the artworks before them. These medieval churches and mosaics all look pretty much alike to the modern eye.

Some of the students form cliques and socialize, as children on school trips do, through shared jokes, teasing, and hair pulling. These excursions, so similar to the field trips they took in elementary school, give these twenty-year-olds a nostalgia for the childhood they’ve not yet completely left behind. They appear mostly indifferent to Galla Placidia’s graven images of power and devotion.

A few listen patiently, however, even ask questions, formulating paper topics, looking ahead to the end of the semester. A couple of them are closet poets, I know—like me in my own student days. I spent two years studying abroad myself, digging through the rubble of these ruined empires in order to write lines inspired by the heritage of Western literature, so intertwined with the nightmare of history, as Joyce called it in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

I watch one of the closet poets caress the intricate marble edge of the central font in the Arian Baptistery, close her eyes, and retreat inward to better feel the contours of the physical history of which we’re all a part. I’m reminded that churches are sensual structures put up for spiritual reasons. They are loci of ritual, where the spiritual and physical collide in the physical gestures of both priests and acolytes; they let us act out the spiritual, sensual, and abstract will to rule and command others, to differentiate ourselves from the ignominy of the common herd through art, power, and celebrity.

* * *

The wind has finally shifted from Siberian to Sirocco, signaling the abrupt change of winter to spring in Italy. Still, the blustery breeze, despite its new warmth, reminds me that the season is still young, tender, and might be blown back toward winter at any moment. Our summer vacations remain distant dreams on the horizon, the utopian ideal of a world without busywork for three glorious months. It’s not a propitious moment to be reflecting on history in the form of political domination, war, and the current messy state of world affairs.

But I’d rather be sailing, as the bumper stickers say.

* * *

A week later I find myself in London, another empire in ruins. The tourist can only consider the remodeled shops and spit-shined Georgian row houses charming—but, oh, how much human suffering this empire cost the world, both here in its now nearly vanished cockney poor and in its many torturous colonial outposts! We prefer to keep our shit out of sight, or merely look away when it lies—in the form of a passed-out, cast-off human being—on the edge of the sidewalk, probably bleeding.

Empires themselves are usually bleeding, in both good and bad ways, losing ground on one frontier while gaining territory by tearing at human flesh on another. Still, if you live in the center of an empire—in Trumpistan for instance—you’re probably looking away and swallowing the same age-old lies: the mythic assumption of white Christian superiority and how it’s your nation’s duty to chain up the slaves and herd them into boats bound for the New World—same as the old world, only hotter.

* * *

To ward off reprisals from the targets of this scurrilous fake novel about the increasingly crass and murderous aristocracy of the new New World Order, I lunch at the Lamb and Flag pub—upstairs, in the Dryden Room. Out the window, the yellow-vested navvies of London carry buckets of detached masonry instead of blood up and down Lazenby Court. Still, there are assassins everywhere: rapacious landlords, cheapshit insurance companies that never pay off, rancid collection agencies, armed police carrying eviction notices, and a billion bystanders who’ll watch you bleed to death on any street corner in any city in the capitalist world without batting an eye. The thugs hired by the new Earls of Rochester to pummel Dryden into submission have a lot of helpers these days. Our current assassins barely have to do anything to earn their blood money. They only occasionally speed up the process by which profit and indifference eventually assassinate the destitute authors of unread books.

* * *

Dryden, Petronius, Wilde, and Pasolini haunt a nearby table. They’re cattily consigning literary critics and murderous aristocrats to the flames of a satirical, literary hell of their own devising. (This is some consolation for the humiliations, beatings, disgraces, and straight-up assassinations we authors have collectively faced. Still, it’s all we have by way of revenge—the written word.)

“You know that Drumpf will come after you if this novel is ever published, if anyone ever reads it,” my fellow wits and scribblers assure me over ale, fish and chips, and mushy peas.

“Despite the fact that he himself had a lot more to do with the text’s composition than you do.”

The other writers laugh at Wilde’s jest—or was it Dryden? It could have been any of them—a jovial wit being our collective curse. (I think even Shakespeare may have been there, now that I think of it.)

* * *

I stumble back downstairs and out into the alley, drunk and full of carcinogenic foodstuffs. I light up a cigarette, stand to finish my ale in the sun in front of the stately old pub, and only vaguely register the speeding afternoon traffic around me. Drumpf can save his blood money. If I live another ten years it’ll be a bloody miracle. The streets of all these cities, the former capitals of fallen empires, are paved with bricks mortared together with sand and blood. How should I presume to survive the Western World’s headlong rush to suicide?

-from Fake Novel (Florence Underground Press, 2020)

Buy this book and cast a curse on all of Bezos’ houses!

June 7, 2021
Upon the Circumcision

I know a woman, though I’ve never met her,
who half a year ago became begetter.
Rosanne begat a little baby guy
and slapped him with the name of Malachai,
which carries Biblical suggestions that
ring true to such vocabulary as ‘begat’.
Once she’d secured her little child’s release
she had the doctor take his frontispiece,
an act that piqued and didn’t let my ire
cool till I learned about her Jewish sire.
As long as I thought Malachai a goy,
I took exception to his pruned McCoy.

This pruning, I have learned, is de rigueur
where no man has a chance to be a Sir,
not since his nation shed the Hanoverian
yoke while maintaining yokes for the non-Aryan.
And yet the other creeds of Abraham,
the ones that take a dimmer view of ham,
some doctors treat as gospel to th’extent
the Jewish schmuck lasts longer than the Gent.
This fact surprises Christian Europeans,
whose own preputia have endured the æons.
Occasionally it goes beyond surprise
and governments poke around behind one’s flies,
a point best proven when the bold Icelandics
voted to enshrine a law that banned dicks
being tampered with. Let young lads keep the foreskin!
A bairn is healthier when he has more skin.

That’s the received wisdom, but what’s received
can leave recipients the more deceived.
The snipped man’s tribulations I confuse
with none of mine, not being in his shoes
or pants. I query not God’s handiwork;
mine’s not a personage I want to irk.
Like Mrs Radcliffe’s monk, he’s darkly hooded,
and sometimes, if it comes to it, full-blooded.

But as all Capuchins will tell you, hoods
pose danger when you’re walking in the woods.
They catch and scratch on those extruding briars,
and thus have snagged and strangled untold friars.
Thorns, naturally, are not a threat in town:
the denim is what pulls my own hood down,
or rather, up. Discreetly trying to nurse
it, hand in pocket, only makes things worse.
Locate a bathroom, drop your pants as fast
as possible and then inspect the mast;
accept it’s likely to require rejigging
to get the sails untangled from the rigging.
One envies now American and heathen,
for anyone who ever sails beneath an
Islamic, Hebrew or a US flag
contends not with this unexpected drag.
Of all the problems a becalmed ship’s cursed
with, though, the foremost always will be thirst.
The fabric’s made me moistureless. Are my
American friends always so bone dry?
(The men, I mean to say: a woman’s nation
has little impact on her irrigation).
Æsthetically, moreover, does my flesh ‘n’
blood suffer from this general regression:
it now looks bald, with six or seven chins
as though in punishment for countless sins,
an exegesis flawed from the beginning –
throughout its life it’s done so little sinning.

So gentile parents of the world, I urge
you buck the scripture of your demiurge!
Keep your family’s male members safe
against the vicious gods of needless chafe.

May 30, 2021
In Review: Emperor of the North Pole

Eric Millman

Cast the hobo to the river.

Well. If you’re looking for a real man’s man movie, you found it! Just a couple o’ boys riding the rails in Depression-era Oregon, drankin’ hooch, trying to stick it to The Man (so to speak). This is a story of glory, glory for story, where men while away their days trying to outwit one another for no real reason other than to uphold some kind of illusory reputation amongst peers to whom they don’t seem particularly close.

Based loosely on the memoirs of Jack London his travels with the Leon Ray Livingston, king of the hobos, the film finds A-No. 1 (Lee Marvin) — AKA “Emperor of the North Pole”, the President of Shitlandia — makes it his mission to defy the balmy, sadistic conductor Shack (Ernest Borgnine at his sexiest since Marty) by hitching the #19 train all the way to Portland. Shack, feared by all and loved by none, exists only to bludgeon hobos who try to ride without paying. In A-No. 1, he has finally met his match, and only one man shall emerge victorious.

Ernest Borgnine, eternal sex symbol.

Filmed in 1973 by a septuagenarian Robert Aldrich, this film is seemingly a parable of the anti-authoritarian spirit split between generations. On one hand there’s A-No. 1, a virtuous wayfarer who, like his rival Shack, is known and respected for a lusty commitment to his values. Though his moral code exists outside of polite society, he is willing to sacrifice everything to uphold it, and for this reason he is A No. 1 and you are not.

Trailing A-No. 1 and dumb as a puppy is the young Cigaret (Keith Carradine, brother of David, who coincidentally had starred in Boxcar Bertha, Martin Scorcese’s Depression-era debut released the year prior), a fellow hobo determined to claim A-No. 1’s throne. Two-faced and vain, Cigaret assumes the goal to ride the #19 without clear cause, power for power’s sake, risking the life of the elder vagrant who does his darndest to teach the damn kid a lesson along the way.

Ernie shows ’em who’s boss.

The issue, then, is that between the virtuously committed A-No. 1, the craven-but-also-committed and extremely attractive Shack, and the capricious Cigaret, the whole fight to the death is nothing if not pointless. The #19 will make it to Portland: the fireman and his team keep the train running smoothly without Shack’s involvement, and indeed it is only when the conductor gets too involved in his hunt for hobos that any real harm comes to the #19 and her crew. While Aldrich is sure to show that the cargo cars are only shown empty, leaving plenty of room for a few of the two million-odd jobless rail riders in America at the time, A-No. 1’s mission is presented without context or rationale: his goal of making it to Portland exists merely to prove a point, a point that very nearly derails the whole train.

Tape it to my bedroom ceiling.

Aldrich stakes his film on an empty cause, siding with A-No. 1 and The Old Way, leaving an imbalance between high stakes and a lack of payoff. Unfortunately, it seems like this was made in and by the wrong generation: a wretched score by Marty Robbins, combined with sappy strings by Frank De Vol, undermine the grit and oversell the glamor (De Vol, I’ll note, scored The Dirty Dozen, Aldrich’s first and most famous collaboration with Marvin and Borgnine; he also provided the arrangement for “Nature Boy”, a song of the perdigiorno if there ever was one).

Marty Robbins + Lee Marvin = No Thanks.

In the final shot of the film, the recently-victorious A-No. 1 can take no more of Cigaret’s opportunistic praise, and throws the kid from a moving train into a river. This is just quite the power move, even for a guy who just fought an axe-and-chain battle to the death. Ultimately, though, we are left looking down upon the floppy Cigaret, bobbing in the water, as A-No. 1 lectures his lungs out from the train. Perhaps we’re meant to slap our knee and say, by golly, the old man’s still got it!, yet there’s something pathetic about him yelling, alone again and increasingly distant, at the closest chance at a friend he had left. It’s as if all of this violent chest-puffing was pointless after all. Yes, sure, A-No. 1 wins, but what’s he going to do once he gets to Portland? Having finally conquered the #19, all he’ll have left is to drink himself to death, and maybe that was Aldrich’s point, cynical as it is.

On the surface, however, with its static panoramas of Dust Bowl Oregon, Emperor of the North Pole reads as little more than a love letter to the past, punctuated by absurdly delicious action scenes fought by some well-greased veterans. Replace the constant ranting about freedom and class, though, with two full hours of Ernest Borgnine swinging a chain, or Lee Marvin swinging a chicken, and I’d be happy. Unfortunately, and much to Aldrich’s disbelief, audiences failed to relate to the film’s values, whatever they may be, and the film flopped.

Lee Marvin and his chicken.

Best: Lee Marvin fights off a man and three boys with a live chicken.

Worst: Lee Marvin forcing a sad old cop to bark like a dog, and then take a slug of moonshine, much to the delight of his “friends” in the hobo jungle. Screw the cop, yes, but also screw all those people hooping and hollering as the fat old guy nearly pukes himself.

“Fun” fact: Producers shortened the title to “Emperor of the North” so that audiences wouldn’t confuse it for a Christmas movie. As such, it makes no sense.

Recommended pairing: If your friends stole your chicken, see if you can’t scare up a pigeon. Otherwise you’ll be stuck stewing dandelion greens with some barley and a flask of hooch.

February 3, 2020
In Review: rectuma, a film for the ageless

Imagine you are a bland, doughy mail clerk named Waldo (Bill Devlin), unburdened by dreams or desires or interests. You may well be. Imagine are on vacation with your wife, Valveeta, a philandering sociopath who wants you dead. Unbeknownst to either of you, a Mexican butt-humping bullfrog has penetrated you physically and without your consent, leaving you with an inexplicable pain in your rear end.

Back home your proctologist, an overzealous, pointy-eared connaisseur du postérieur, recognizes this immediately as reptilian rape, but when it comes to cures, he throws his hands up. There’s simply nothing western medicine can do for you, he’s sorry to say. Unless…

Unless what? I’ll do anything, you cry!

Well, he says, there is one solution. A Japanese scientist (“very authentic: accent, slanty eyes, little penis,” drawls the doctor) can provide you with an experimental, radioactive rod-based procedure to quell your problems. Only — oops! — he’s just broken off his rod in your rectum, and your ass has turned a glowing green.

It seems your bottom (now looking more like a hairy rum babà than anything) has broken off from its top, and is killing those who have wronged you. Unaffiliated fat people, too.

Your ass has grown to colossal proportions and is now attacking the city. Your ass must be stopped.

Detective Cosacca getting his just desserts.

It took three evenings for me to watch the full ninety-five minutes of Mark Pirro’s Rectuma (2003), a film which aspires to the no-budget heights of Troma Entertainment, but with 100% less surf nazis dying. While I can conclude from this viewing that Rectuma (pronounced “Reck-uh-tooma”) is most certainly a film, it did leave me with a few questions.

Why Them? Often in films of this particular strain, tragedy befalls the most virtuous loser in a world of unvirtuous winners, forcing our hero to face his fears and whip the world back into a more suitable state. No doubt, the exasperated, cuckolded Waldo hardly deserved to be violated by the flippant frog. Still, I found myself wondering: why his butt? More, why his butt? While the good Detective Cipolla (Italian for “onion”, amongst the most sulphuric of foods) must face down her own fear of the bare derriere in order to crack this case, does she really? Perhaps a result of my own formulaic and chauvinistic inclinations, I found myself wanting for a Waldo-Cipolla union to rationalize her very presence in the film; her gobsmacking Clarice Starling impersonation was the only sense I could make of it. In sum: more butt backstory, more bottom b-plot, or both, would’ve gone a long way in activating poor Waldo.

Why music? All due respect to the composer Andrew Gold (not that Andrew Gold, is it?!), but I would’ve liked further elaboration on the lone, haunting melody that repeats, ad infinitum, from start to end. Please, give us more of that floating chorus, that bone-chilling duet droning self-reflexive lyrics in anticipation of the audience’s bewilderment, superimposed into urinals and onto rocks like the supercilious sirens they are…but perhaps spring for an extra melody along the way? I would counter, however, that preferable to this plinky earworm driving us toward certain madness might be liberating us of the convention of a soundtrack altogether. Moreover, ignoring the recurring, onscreen debate over the value of subtitles, why not dispense with sound altogether? Other than the fart noises. The fart noises stay.

Singing in the bathtub.

Why not Jews? For all the, um, subtle, playful jabs at feminists (the severe, sexless reporter “Gloria Sternvirgin”), Muslims (the gibberish-speaking terrorist “Summa Cum Laden”), African-Americans (the large-phallused adulterer “Johnny Peck”), Asians (“Dr. Wansamsake”), and homosexuals (“Detective Cocksucker”), as a Jewish-American I must admit I felt left out. When Summa Cum Laden, straddling a rocket housed within Waldo’s giant rear, declares, “smells like home!” I could only dream of the type of punchline awaiting my people. Perhaps in the forthcoming sequel about Waldo’s radioactive nuts, my people shall be liberated.

Why now? Certainly with today’s popularity of ‘90s pastiche, from the Adult Swim universe to dad fashion to the reboot of Walker, Texas Ranger, one is tempted to declare Rectuma ahead of its time. Apart from its metamodern glitch aesthetics, shot perhaps on an Omnimovie VHS, apart from Cipolla’s constant references to Jodie Foster’s career-making turn in Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991), we are treated to punchlines that scream 1995, not 2003. Regarding the size of Waldo’s mutant ass: “Are we talking Oprah large or Sally Struthers large?” Regarding the revelation that, with the city under attack, Waldo indeed has no ass: “neither does Courtney Cox.” To watch Rectuma is to be transported back to a time well in advance of its year of release, forcing one to ask: why now? Why am I watching this right now?

All of this is not to say that I am questioning Mark Pirro’s filmic intuition or mettle. Certainly, with a career spanning four decades (from 1978’s burger-slasher short, Buns, to the forthcoming zombie vengeance feature, The Dead Don’t Desist!), the folks and Pirromount must be doing something right. Rather, at a time when we must consider ourselves lucky to have our own asses still intact, Rectuma compels one to oneself toward self-examination, top to bottom, for the ultimate question of all: in the case of the dismembered ass, where does all the shit come from? Thanks to the unsinkable Mark Pirro, we have both question and answer.

Summa Cum Laden

Rectuma, 2003.

Written, produced, and directed by Mark Pirro.

Pirromount Pictures.

February 3, 2020