Edizioni Darkmatter

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Ricc Sabba
Fame Fame

Introduction
Fame (the Italian for hunger) or fame. A longing for food placated by basic nutrients, primitive somehow, or notoriety, the rite of affluence. Want or excess. Some work to obtain fame, while others because of fame: so the saying goes. It’s fame that sometimes becomes fame when emigrating to the capital cities of the empire. Not so for my maternal grandfather. He left for America on the notorious steamships and there found a wife. Then my mother, her two sisters. Back again to Italy: no fame but with a family, that was because he was a baker perhaps …and bread appeases hunger!
Sure, languages aren’t good for arithmetics, you use the same letters and the result changes, but the distance between the meanings of this word, in the language of the hegemonic culture and in ours, today finds a booster in the show which is none other than the made-up needs of our Western world. This domineering culture of ours leads astray the meaning of words to tune it to the ruling world of ostentation, while the other side of the world looks on, powerless always, often hungry.
Powerless too after September 11th: is there a different meaning to terrorism? The strongest stage wars from time immemorial, invade, conquer with their armies. Which power is terrorism evidence of other than a weakness with no way out?
Once in the showbiz you had to scrimp and save and bow before your precious public. Nowadays the show is the model chosen by those who have the power and they, if needs be, do what far-sighted Carmelo Bene used to do some thirtyfive years ago from the stage: pee on the audience. The mighty are on close terms and add their own blow to the first - cultural unison – diverting everything onto that ill-fated world that, if first and among us, is unemployed, or it’s far and then it is second, third, fourth: food there means fame-hunger. Their food is necessary, essential, while ours is often a fabrication, unnecessary when not deadly, useful only to the profits of any multinational.
From this assumption I’m going to introduce you to my microcosm, what transpires through food and my brain. It’s just like looking for the infinitely small, to measure in order to understand is to shift one’s ground: so subtle can reason be, so difficult it can be to digest.
As for the images I’m carrying on with my idea of proposing the impression of the subject under very strong lighting, taking care wherever possible to document a section if I couldn’t find a way to make light filter through it. I have already given this game a name in a former publication of mine, lightgraphy, looking for some similarities with the definition used for the systems of medical-scientific investigation which show the inside of the human body.

···

Meat.

The strength of blood

Renata’s meatballs
It’s a dish that goes back to when I was thirty. It belongs to the friends from that period, entertained on meatballs. That they were good goes without saying: they were extremely popular. They were made with herbivors’… meat. Yes, a different time and not only for bullocks. The course is marked: in 1916 my grandfather came back from America to defend his fatherland. He chose the world of values instead of the world of affluence and, at five, my mother knew the adventure of steamships and then, rather worse, that of a father at war. Values existed, they had strong colours, unequivocal. The years of that century have gone by stripping the flesh off that world until, by the end of the 60s, not a few got lost in the attempt to find them again. Sure, values did change together with ideologies, these too existed. But values, or disvalues, existed. With a plus or a minus before them... yes, that’s the difference, perhaps: facts had a plus or a minus before them, a sort of political, social algebra. Today we are getting near quantum mechanics and this forthcoming revolution will shatter that of computers, 0-1, which has just been born. Quantum computers, we read, will be able to acquire data not one by one with their series of noughts and ones, but in clusters, families, bunches. Plank’s germ has already bred its first technological fruits with laser applications. Most of the world can just wait, with fewer and fewer ideals to dream. In Italy we counter affluence and technology with instinct more than with reason, the crises of social growth with the regression of a demagogue elected to govern. What kind of mixture is triggered by the eccessive power of a few together with the numberless possibilities offered by technology?

Strength without blood

···

Rabbit.
It’s white meat of no great value. More so, it is brains risen to the highest level, uneatable not so much for the excess of cholesterol they contain but for what it provokes: a proliferation of its species, devastating for the country. Rabbi(t) after rabbi(t)*, all solutions thrive to personal favour, there, around the lower belly where the worst feel like one man. And the ingredients are those of the market: false accounting, preservation of one’s assets tax-free, “papal” immunity and whatever else, also the abatement of taxes so many have been hoping for. Everything seasoned with adulterations, colouring agents, perfumes, fresh growths. One trick after another, in short. There, this is what it is: the meat of a conjurer.
* Am. Slang: advisor to a criminal

ODigestif.
Overfed, risking obesity.
Some thousand Westerners were there to digest the excess of their daily life.
Overrich, risking reason.
Some were there in search of transgression perhaps.
I do not like digetifs, I consider them veritable bowel-busters. I have an immediate skin-deep reaction just hearing the word and skin cracks appear on me.
Overpowerful, risking humanity.
Now so many are there looking for corpses, the ones and the others both unexpected like the tremors of the earth.
Nothing makes us more common than a common death but we don’t want our dead to lie in a common grave. And even less do we want them cremated. We need the body: things are easier with the insurance company. Moreover many believe in a God who will call them by name on the day of their resurrection. The name must be written on the casket. True, but which alphabet should be used?
Between the search and the aid someone said: enough! A doubt begins to creep in that in the restless East the cowboys are doing all they can to be there: “footfirst” in the dish?

Footfirst

Ricc Sabba
Fame Fame
Pages: 44
Format: 18,5x19 cm
Genre: pastiche
Illustrations: fourteen photos by the author himself.
Language: Italian or English

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