I place cloth, thick, between claws and skin
because scratching's not my thing
I stay away from cold walls, wet tiles
My wiles are for the warm and dry
I walk away now from talons and teasing
I seek the ease of my teetering home
-E

In the fog you never find the middle
or the end, rainbow-like
solid and invisible
It starts somewhere and ends somewhere,
somehow, or maybe not, an illusion
A broken stick, a covered track
an outline shadow for a moment
An illusion of you having passed
here and there,
wherever and nowhere.

-E

The express shuttles vessels of sadness
hurtles them along when it comes;
It is out there somewhere, inevitable
Approaching from murky roads.

Weary ones in the sad, dark dusk
bleary with eyes full of sleep
shivering in a drowsy shock
in damp morning by the road
Unwilling and unready
under dim fluorescence
to yield to a far off destination

They speak tight lipped and dazed
Speaking volumes in blank gazes
Aware and not paying attention
Catching eyes but not turning
Feigning interest, uninterested
They look down the road and at watches
longing and eager, so eager
to board.

-E

Groping in full daylight
with darkened minds
Our partners peer into eyes
seeing nothing but color
Nothing of the world
hidden behind them
The face is a great wall...

Unknown worlds, never knowable
sporting faces, blank faces
pursed lips, poker faces
full of emotion and signs
Eyes that flash a clue, sometimes
the barest clue, barely
Crowds of worlds walking by
down this street, that street
Worlds within cities
Dying worlds, always,
some barely inhabited.

-E

I asked, "Do you feel weird?"
telling your confusions to me
I said that I did; you too
You left him
I still don't know why
And I left her
We are dancing
with each other's partners, it seems
Partners we cannot see
hanging onto our shoulders
Playing a silent music
that moves us.

-Evan

The candle makes the shadows wave,
so you wavered in your flight.

The dainty drop of fire i lit,
did you see it?

You blew it out to blind me

And home you flew away
on the smoke.

-E

The weird harmonies, unusual instrumentation and arrangements, an eclectic sense of experimentation and a general giddiness are part of what make Italian movie soundtrack music of the '60s and '70s so cool and intriguing.

Thanks to the efforts of countless music bloggers and others on the web, it has been possible not only to sample this wonderful subgenre but also to build up whole and sensible collections of this other-worldy music.

So today I'm posting just a tantalizing few examples.

"Mr. Dante Fontana" (composer, Piero Piccioni), from Fumo di Londra (1966) (3:42).

The first track here, "Mr. Dante Fontana," is an extraordinary one by the composer Piero Piccioni, and its wonderful strangeness has seduced and intrigued music hipsters all across the blogosphere.
It comes from a minor 1966 Italian comedy, Fumo di Londra, directed by and starring the beloved Alberto Sordi. The premise of the film---Italian guy dreams of going to London to don gentlemanly bowlers and brollies---shows the shift in cultural axis away from '50s Rome as Europe's capital of cool toward '60s Swinging London. The third clip here from Fumo di Londra places the music in context, starting with a breathless pan of London and then a series of zoom-ins showing Sordi as Fontana emerging from various British institutions decked out in stiff-upper-lip finery. By evidence of this scene and reviews, the movie looks to be not very good, the direction appears amateurish and slack. But nonetheless it showcases a fine musical mind.

The first two clips are two different youtube postings of the same track. The pitch seems different on both, and probably the first one is correct. But I post both for comparison's sake. The third clip is the scene described above.

Another Mr. Dante Fontana (3:23)

In context (short scene from Fumo di Londra (1:29):

"Amore Per Tutti" from Juliet of the Spirits (1965, directed by Federico Fellini, music by Nino Rota). Rota of course is most famous for scoring The Godfather but he was prolific in Italian cinema, particularly in films for Fellini. This is a nice segment from a film---a tribute to Fellini's wife, the lead actress Giulietta Massini---that still divides fans and critics. I think it's a stunning masterpiece but others remain unconvinced. Rota's music is off-kilter, weird, lyrical and wonderful.

(4:11) Final scene from 8 ½ (1963, directed by Federico Fellini, music by Nino Rota). Rota adopts a carnivalesque motif to cap Fellini's great masterpiece, a surreal march of everyone who played a part, large and small, in one man's life. The theme here is "life is a celebration," which is ironic because the events leading up to this deeply moving scene of affirmation are marked by uncertainty, impotence, ennui, creative block and a sense of purposelessness; a man in crisis in reflection and fighting the dispiriting forces of life negation.

(2:28) "Spy chase" composed by Bruno Nicolai, from the 1967 spy adventure, Agente speciale L.K. [aka, Lucky, el Intrepido]. I don't know anything about this film, but this short track has all the oobba doobba vibraphone jazzy cheesiness that lounge hounds love. And so do I.

Il Sorpasso opening credits (composed by Riz Ortolani), 1962. (3:51). Dino Risi's 1962 comedy-drama, also known as The Easy Life was one of my cinematic revelations this year. I had tried to track down a copy of this movie for three decades, and finally downloaded one off the net. It's a fantastic film, a road movie in which we learn about the hidden frailty of its seemingly robust and confident protagonist as his motoring journey with a young neophyte nears the end of the road and the mistakes of his past loom larger in the headlights. Vittorio Gassman plays the flawed lounge lizard to perfection. The jazzy score by Ortolani captures his lust for life and the exuberance of spanking-bright Italy in the early 1960s.

My father, who was a local labor leader and president for many years, died five years ago. Among his effects was a book called, "Help for the Working Wounded," issued by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers and written by a fellow named Dr. Thomas Mancuso.
Well, I picked up this pulpy looking thing and read it, and it was a shocking and detailed litany of safety outrages perpetrated upon working people by careless corporations. A lot of these dangers involved the use of toxic chemicals in manufacturing.
Mancuso died in 2004 at age 92 after devoting his life to studying the effects of these exposures and fighting for stricter rules to protect workers. When the government pressured him to water down his findings about radiation exposure, he told them in his own way that they could fuck themselves. And his funds were cut off. But he kept on going and published his studies anyway.
Mancuso's one of those heroes that doesn't get mentioned in our general discourse, and in fact, even the English version of Wikipedia doesn't have an entry on him---but the German version does. Go figure.
There's not much on the web either, apart from this adequate piece from a blog called Confined Space.
So, let's make Dr. Thomas Mancuso our hero of the day.
-Evan

False

Is your Christian mission
to coo in a brute's ear?
Who do you delude
with your humor
are you fooling your muse
or fueling a tumor
Are you singing his praises
or raising traces of scorn
stinging your soul
wth false embraces

c. 2001, 2008 Evan Gilling

Let's see, I'd say that I've activated the inventory control system---you know, that gate that straddles the front doors and beeps---at Walmart about 4 times and at Meijer at least once. Guess what I do when the beeper goes off? I keeps on a walkin.' And why is that? Because my ass doesn't steal shit from those stupid stores. Therefore, I ain't stoppin' just because they failed to demagnetize a product that I properly bought at the checkout aisle with my hard-earned money. I figure if they really think I'm guilty, they'll run out after me. Not once have they ever done this. I even bought a TV that activated the beeper and I didn't stop, and they didn't come after me! I paid for it and had a receipt, so why should I waste my time and stop? I didn't. And nobody cared. I notice that these things go off a lot when black people are exiting the store, and I guarantee you they are guilty of nothing. It's just some security person manually activating the system based on suspicion alone. This is anecdotal, but I've seen so many cases of innocent black shoppers stopped on the way out of Walmart that it really begins to look blatantly racist. The fact that the black shoppers always stop, rather than run, pretty much proves they're innocent, and after a search they turn out to be vindicated. But they live in a system in which they realize the consequences of not stopping could be even worse. They don't have the luxury of me, a white guy, to simply breeze past the beeping automated robot-voice command: "you have activated Walmart's inventory control system, please step back to allow someone to assist you," or whatever the fuck it says. I never hear all of it, after all, 'cause I'm halfway to my car by then. The silliness of the Walmart Keystone Kops was spelled out in our local paper a couple of years ago when it carried a story about an old man who had been stopped by Walmart security, who insisted that he had pocketed something of value. After taking the guy to the "interrogation room" and turning his pockets and clothes inside and out and every which way---and still not finding anything---they nonetheless insisted still that he had taken something. He never left the store, they found nothing on him, but he was absolutely guilty in their minds. He finally was released after much humiliation by all concerned. So Walmart, activate this. -EG

You might ask, why the fuck am I in SprawlMart in the first place? A legitimate query, which I may address in a later missive.