Every year, at the beginning of September, tv and newspapers repeat night and day how desperate are parents in this period and how they look forward to sending their kids to school. Say what you want, but I find this a really sad message.
Before deciding to have a baby, we quit our permanent job contracts and started working remotely as freelancers. There’s much freedom this way, for sure, but there’s much more instability too. One month goes well, another one goes bad. At the end we generally earn a little bit less than before, but we are happier. We can live and raise our child, for example, instead of having to hand him to a babysitter. Lucky people – you may say at this point. Easy to say that – we can answer back.
Do you have any idea of what it means to manage your work while your child is in the same house? Or, more simply, do you have an idea of what it means to stay 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with your child without any break, even at your office (meaning that you see your son just 3 hours in the evening or – better – that is not you, for all day long, that feed him, change him, wash him, send him to sleep, play and talk to him, face his everyday screams, frustrations and tantrums.)
Yet, after saying all this, for me the day the school begin, it’s quite a sad day. It’s not the day when I scream “finally I’m free!”. Maybe I’m masochist, or just weird, but it’s the day when I think that I’m gonna miss him so much because, even If I know that at last I’m are gonna work better and peacefully and even do something for us, a day with him is always a better day than one without him.
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As I recently wrote in a tweet, I’m reading the awesome book “Bruce“, by Peter A. Carlin; A reading that’s shaking my soul, because it’s like digging into the soundtrack of my entire life.
Springsteen is simply Bruce for me too: a friend, a companion, an alter ego, the voice of the “beaten up and the fairs”. He’s surely not the Boss, a nickname that he obviously hates too: furthermore, isn’t the boss usually a synonymous of despicable?
Bruce came into my life with The River, on a smooth highway getting goose bumps. I heard – and saw in Betamax, those big old videotapes – dozens of versions, all of them. But one, in particular, thrilled me: the long spoken intro version that made him cry too when performing it live. I don’t know if you ever listened to it, wanna try? don’t forget tissues.
I then followed Bruce for my entire life and he, I like thinking so, did the same, hiding behind some weird coincidences. I always deeply loved him and besides many music crushes – the biggest for the Cure – I never cheated on him.
Because at full volume or in background, he’ve been always the one who played in my life. Especially when I fell down. “Come on rise up”. And I got up. “If I should fall behind wait for me”. And somebody stopped waiting for me. “I wish I were blind when I see you with your man” and even the worst delusion would turn into poetry.
In 2004, like Ames, I tried to find him closely too. A trip to New York inevitably turned into an unforgettable tour of his New Jersey. That’s why I walked on the wood boardwalk of Atlantic City and Asbury Park, the city of his famous postcard record cover; that I touched the white and blue Madame Marie’s cabin on the beach; that I set my foot on the atrium of the Stone Pony sacred temple; that I moved in circle through the streets of Freehold, trying to grab the scent of the Springsteen; that I really ate a pizza at Federici’s, with my eyes glued not on the mozzarella but on the myriad of Bruce pictures hung up on the walls of this legendary pizzeria.
Than I came back home – meaning my life – but without closing the door behind, in order to better listen to his invitations that I always forward to myself many times: “Mary climb in, it’s a town full of losers and I’m pulling out of here to win”.
I always hated brainstorming and finally more than somebody** agrees with me. Come on! Brainstorming doesn’t work at all. I saw the worst ideas coming out from brainstorming.
People (yes, also creative ones) need time to think. They need to focus. They need concentration. And how can they do that in a meeting full of people? “Creative meeting” is a paradox, it doesn’t mean anything: at the end it’s just a useless, stupid, huge time loss.
Do you know what really happens (I saw that with my own eyes for almost 15 years) in that situation? Great minds don’t speak, because they need time to consider, to ponder, to think. The others open their mouths (often too much) and just say…craps!
Let’s clarify: craps and creative ideas are not the same. On the contrary they are two really really different things. Otherwise everyone could be a creative and that’s not the case.
Well… brainstorming is the homeland of the fake creatives. The real ones just want to stay in their office thinking. Alone.
*Susan Cain (author of “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking“) wrote:
“40 years of research has repeatedly demonstrated that our performance gets worse when group size increases. So, if you have talented or motivated people, encourage them to work alone.”
**Jena McGregor on “The Washington Post” wrote:
“We’ve all been there. The boardrooms with flip charts at the front of the room and candy on the table. The all-hands emergency meetings to come up with ideas to fix the latest mess. And of course, the offsites in drab hotel ballrooms that are supposed to somehow spark creativity. Such efforts at brainstorming are well intended, of course. The problem? They rarely work…”
Spain and Italy. Two countries in the same troubles, with the same difficulties, in the same position in front of the world economic crisis, everybody says. But are we really sure about that? Do Spain and Italy, right now, offer the same quality of life? Let’s take a look, for example, at this tiny but we think enlightening comparison: what happens if you want to rent a bike in Barcelona? And what happens if you want to do the same thing in Rome?
Barcelona is a city where, if needed, you can live without a car, since every main street has a practical and enjoyable cycle lane. Above all, if you don’t have your own bike, it can be rented easily and in many many ways. One of the most known is renting red and white bikes from Barcelona Biking. Aligned along Las Ramblas, Plaza Catalunya, near Arc de Triomf, walking in Barceloneta, Port Olimpic and so on, the red and white bikes are clean, always tidy and ready to be used. How? You can subscribe to the service for just 43 dollars (30 euros) per year. With the internet ordered card, you can go to any Barcelona Bicing point, take a bike and use it for 2 hours. Then you have to return the bike to any other Barcelona Bicing point around the city. A public, cool, efficient service that’s open almost all the time and that in just two years can count on 190.000 subscribers.
Let’s switch to Rome now. Some time ago, a celeb italian newspaper (“La Repubblica” online) wrote this line: “In the centre of Rome bike sharing is a flop”. So, what’s happened in the Italy’s capital city? Bike sharing parkings are completely derelict and empty because all the bikes have been stolen. At “Campo de’ fiori”, “Piazza Colonna” and the “Pantheon” the situation is the same and in place of bikes you can find some cars, motorcycles, and even chairs and tables of some restaurants that illegally occupy the area. In general, bike sharing parkings are dirty and covered with stickers or spray paint, while pilasters are smudgy and wrecked. Besides, calling the toll-free number dedicated to this “public service” is totally useless. They just answer to you: “The bikes have been stolen”. And that’s all.
Of course it’s just a tiny example but, although Spain and Italy live both really tough times, we honestly think that Italy needs much more “riding on his bike”.
Sometimes, to find again “good old” movies, you don’t have to follow a director. You have to follow an actor.
It’s the case of Ryan Gosling. Start with “Drive”. Then take a seven years back leap and find him again, really young, in “The Notebook”. At that point you can skip as you like, back and forth: “Blue Valentine”, “The Believer”, “All Good Things”, “Half Nelson”, “The Ides of March”, “The Place Beyond the Pines”. Always and anyway you’ll find him, Ryan Gosling, and the “good old” movies.
But what defines a “good old” movie? Honestly, this is the harder question to be answered because, in this world, not everything is easily explainable in words. You don’t take a seat and watch “good old” movies. “Good old” movies rule. When they start they grasp and carry you away. Since the first frame. They take you in their arms, they take you with strength, with a trick or a special song. Certainly, for all their duration, you are not anymore where you were before and there’s no way to come back not even for a second. “Good old” movies don’t accept you being distracted, they just make that impossible.
Your life becomes that film and when at the credits you are flung back, it’s like awakening from an hypnosis, coming back from another world. You don’t suddenly rise up, you don’t immediately remember who you were before that movie started: you stay there, running through names that seem to be made so long on purpose, to give you the time to recover without facing consequences of a too harsh trauma.
Then, when you proceed with your life, an unexplainable feeling stays inside you for a long time. With that Ryan Gosling’s face. Gosling, who above all, seems to have been taken hostage from “good old” movies, till he can’t choose something different to work in.
For this reason, if you are looking for “good old” movies, you just have to follow him. Hoping that he’ll never take a different road. At least without warning us first.
