Il Teatro Degli Orrori
Live al Duel Beat, 12/11/2009

Premise: This concert, in fact, and like many other things I intended to do and that have been swirling in my head in recent months, never existed.
Once, I wanted to see Il Teatro degli Orrori live and I came close. Before resigning myself, alone, to the horrors of our daily life and what has been. These, these horrors, we can find everywhere, on the streets of our city or comfortably seated on the sofas of our homes. In front of the television.
Every now and then, we can change the channel. But the shows are always the same and, in front of the miseries of the human race and all history, I become numb.

In November two-thousand-nine, I had formed a certain idea about Il teatro degli orrori. I had read some rather positive review about them in a specialized magazine that today I buy less and less because, while it is true that the web is now destroying printed paper and that the uselessness of all things is in turn destroying the web and everything good about the quick availability and immediacy of multimedia, it is also true that monthly publications have never quite appealed to me. Generally too heavy and stuffed with articles and information that often stray from the primary content of the magazine and that often seem tailor-made to stretch the broth. They are tailor-made to stretch the broth.
To stay on topic, “A sangue freddo”, the second and so far latest album by Il teatro degli orrori, was presented as their consecration. In fact, then, things really went that way, since the band, led by One Dimensional Man Pierpaolo Capovilla, has received excellent critical and public attention in recent months, so much so that they can now be considered more than just one of the many independent and emerging bands from good old Italy. As for me, however, from a cursory listen to the productions of Capovilla and his companions, I had formed, as I was saying, my own idea of Il teatro degli orrori: overall, I did not adopt an attitude of superiority, unwavering skepticism, and prejudice against the band, nor did they seem to me to be stuff exclusively for kids like Le luci della centrale elettrica. Just that, while there are indeed contents in Il teatro degli orrori, they had left me - and still leave me today - quite indifferent.
I found the near homonymy of Giulio Ragno Favero, a good musician and producer of some relative fame, with Mario Pigozzo Favero, poet and leader of Valentina Dorme, and the band's geographic origin, which, due to the One Dimensional Band, I placed in Veneto, a region that curiously - but not too much - has in the last ten or fifteen years produced unforgivable beasts such as Luca Zaia, but also great bands: Valentina Dorme and One Dimensional Man themselves, the great and generally forgotten Northpole.
In short, these Il teatro degli orrori seemed like decent folks and, when I learned they would be playing in Naples, I decided to conquer my traditionally historic laziness and my hesitations and, despite it being the twelfth of November of one of the shittiest autumns from a climatic and meteorological standpoint (but not only?), which the history of Southern Italy and my personal memory recall for many years now, I dragged my ass onto the Vespa and headed straight to the Duel Beat, where, based on my fragmentary and - as we will see later, absolutely mistaken - information, Capovilla, Ragno Favero, and all the others would play. It is considered significant that I decided to set foot again in that post, a desecrated former cinema now dedicated to disco and the animation of the more or less well-off young people of Naples, and I kept a terrible memory of since the last time I had set foot there, I had attended a concert by Gianni Maroccolo, then engaged in a horrendous as well as useless musical project (IG) with such Ivana Gatti. Up to that point, I had considered Maroccolo a nice guy and a decent musician, though a lousy producer - also in this sense see some works of the various CCCP and similar and the worst ever production of Fiumani, that "Il ritorno dei desideri" where even there are present songs among the best ever written by good Federico Fiumani, but forced by arrangements destined not to leave a mark and that have little to do with the style of our hero - but that evening it ended up that I had to reconsider my point of view. Maroccolo remains a nice guy, but he might not even be a great musician as much as at least a good performer. Anyway, what matters in this whole story is that I wanted to go out again, after so long, and this seemed like a good thing.

Regarding the Duel Beat, I had obviously reserved the right to return there if ever Federico Fiumani himself had played there one of these days, but at that time the prospect seemed unlikely and unrealistic. And so it appeared until last May, when FF played with his Diaframma in that cursed venue, forcing me to set foot there once again.

In November two-thousand-nine the Duel Beat was located - and obviously still is, since no one has moved it in these months - on the border between the municipality of Pozzuoli and that of Naples, in a geographic region generally better known as the Agnano basin and characterized by a humidity rate not too dissimilar to that of the Po Valley and the suggestive presence of geysers and sulfur fumaroles, which give the entire region a mystical and characteristic aspect, clearly too underestimated by our administrations and Naples and Campania's tourist operators. The region is also famous for being the site of the Agnano Hippodrome, a facility where traditionally the dreams of those who spend their days dreaming of a different life chasing a trot and a gallop are shattered, and for being infested and militarized for too many years by the Americans of NATO.
Now, all this story and NATO's events in Naples have inevitably something to do with the past and present history of my city and in particular with those of the Cimmino family. It is undeniable indeed that, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the American presence in this region, even traditionally and historically difficult and too conditioned over the centuries by the presence of the Bourbons or the turn Aragonese, and beyond Renzo Arbore's and his brothers' ridiculous acts, produced only damage and was a cause of still today unstoppable social and cultural degradation and impoverishment. It is enough to walk down the streets of the city without lowering one's head to see monsters and deformations, distortions of American and capitalist politics not too dissimilar from those exported with napalm in Vietnam, with smart bombs in Afghanistan and Iraq, with propaganda and television worldwide.
Grandpa Cimmino, whom we will conveniently call Pietro Cimmino, was born in Agnano in the early years of the last century. Since he was born the son of poor illiterate peasants too much and only attached to the land, his story seemed marked and destined in fact to retrace the one lived over the centuries by those who had preceded him. But Pietro Cimmino, who was a big man like a mountain, but not too intelligent, like many overall in those years and as always at a certain point in his story, the man who, as we know and sang Homer at the dawn of human civilization, is always and in any case destined to reach a breaking point in his life and to embark on a journey, unlike all his family members, he decides to leave the land and move to the city, to Naples, which was then more or less like today a toilet, but to Pietro's eyes it must have appeared boundless, revolutionary and even science fiction.
In certain respects, this decision will prove to be short-sighted. Pietro Cimmino, settled in the Spanish quarters, worked until he was fifty as a “butcher's boy” at a shop in his neighborhood and died of an unexpected heart attack, although perhaps predictable given his bulk of over one hundred kilograms and a lifestyle not particularly healthy and consisting of generous meals and drink of red wine, after having brought nine (and I say 9) children into the world and having lived a shitty life, made of creditors, poverty, and a not too brief interlude spent between Greece, Albania, and Sicily fighting, like so many others, a war whose reasons appeared incomprehensible to him and whose enemy, fascist and bothersome, he could often find among his comrades rather than in enemy ranks. I do not know if he ever shot anyone if he was ever afraid of not returning home and if he ever came close to losing his sanity terrorized by too much horror. Pietro Cimmino never liked to talk about his World War and the years of imprisonment in the United States of America, in the Georgia camps. During the Second World War, in fact, over 50,000 Italians were taken prisoners by the Americans and transported to US prisoner camps. Pietro Cimmino was among them and, after the armistice of 1943, like others, he was employed in agricultural work to replace the missing American workforce due to the war. The pay was eighty cents a day, but, we more or less all know this story, my grandfather never saw a cent since this pay was received by the Italian State and never remitted to the former prisoners once back on Italian soil.

It must have been also because of all this, anyway, that Pietro Cimmino always voted communist. Certainly he had never read Marx and Russia more than a promised land must have appeared to him as something to be avoided at all costs, and it was sadly known to him for the tragic end of many Italians on the front during the War. Simply, the Americans and chewing gum never appealed to him, the more so that in the years following the war, when NATO “bought” large plots of land in Agnano, parts of which had by then become the property of the Cimmino family, the old Pietro, renounced and disinherited by his family, once more did not even get a cent of broken dollar. The other Cimminos, on the other hand, made a decent sum and opened a restaurant that still exists today and where you eat well, but I am holding back from naming here not to run into complaints and lawsuits. The fact is, years later, when Pietro died prematurely leaving his family in debts and the blackest poverty, no one helped widow Cimmino and her nine children, who over the years grew resentful towards the Americans, their past, their relatives, and their very roots. A thirst for revenge that never found any justification. Until November two-thousand-nine.

The rest, in fact, is recent history. Carlo Cimmino, who then would be me, arrives at Duel Beat at about ten in the evening. It's damn cold and raining, and in the space in front of the venue's entrance, there isn't a living soul, except for its keeper, according to whom the Duel would open its doors not before an hour and a half or two. I huddled into my windbreaker and, leaning against a gate, imagined I would smoke a cigarette if only I had one if only I ever smoked. I decided that this place disgusted me and wondered what I was doing there, on a cold November evening and in the rain, waiting for the opening of that damned venue. I have nothing against Il teatro degli orrori, but I sincerely didn't even intend to suffer so much for an hour and a half of music.
But things often do not happen by chance and history had wanted that date. It's ten-thirty when people start to arrive: they're strange people, the kind you would never expect at a concert of an indie-rock band or so-called. Girls too vulgarly made up in miniskirts and slim underwear on display and guys red from cancerous lamps. The thing begins to stink and it's not even entirely due to the sulfur emanations from the fumaroles. “What am I doing here?” I ask myself, and as often happens in my seemingly not very turbulent life, even before waiting for the answer, I'm already on my Vespa, heading home, where – I had already decided – I would get drunk listening to a Replacements record.

And so it was that, among the fumaroles, I found myself faced with my family's history. The restaurant peeked out between the sulfur gases of the fumaroles and along the road that would take me home appeared like a mirage or a hallucination. Had it been an evening like any other I would have gone straight my way, but, as already mentioned, history had wanted that date: I, Carlo Cimmino, was thirsting for revenge and would avenge my grandfather's death. I would avenge it and the circle would finally be closed. Only in this way, I thought, would his soul find peace. I parked the Vespa, left a Euro tip for the more or less illegal parking attendant, and entered the restaurant.
The place was rustically furnished with wooden tables and chairs and traditional red and white checkered tablecloths. Large chandeliers illuminated the spacious rooms whose walls were decorated with large windows and pictures depicting Vesuvius and, generally, the Gulf of Naples. At the entrance, a wood-fired oven for pizzas was immense. I sat at a table and ordered one, with four cheeses, after sipping a light bottle of beer. I was trying to recognize in the faces of the waiters, the pizza maker, and all the patrons of the place the typical traits of the Cimmino or to catch in their eyes a guilty look, an admission of guilt that would have changed my mind and quench my thirst for revenge. But all gazes seemed absent to me and all in all too little interested in me, considered rightly or wrongly a customer like many. Nor could I make out if among them there were distant relatives of mine: certainly, the high percentage of baldness among the restaurant's staff led me to imagine that at least some of them were a distant relative of mine, but it seemed too little and my claims, without a subject to address, thus fell into the void or ended drowned in the usual glass of beer. I ate the pizza, which was good, and paid the bill. Then I made my way towards the exit.
What happened next maybe - but only maybe - didn't really happen, but if it ever did, I would have imagined it that way.

Outside, a cold wind blew that scratched the face and aged and dried up the soul and hearts before the skin, but at least it had stopped raining. I put on my windbreaker and my wool cap and, leaving the venue, cast my gaze toward the sky, too dark and crowded with gray clouds and that in any case promised nothing good. Then towards the tip of my shoes, sadly noting that my sneakers now seemed to have reached the end of the line. I lit a cigarette, it had been years since I tried to quit smoking, and I stopped to wait for something to happen.
There was an old man sitting on a bench, who scrutinized me with a cynical and disinterested look, for him probably I must have simply been part of the landscape and must have been nothing else but an asshole smoking a cigarette after leaving a restaurant and after eating a four cheese pizza. and all in all it wasn't too far from the truth. In the distance, you could hear the barking of dogs that probably rummaged through the mountains of garbage in my city. The world seemed closer to the end of the world than to its beginning and I finally overcame my hesitations and addressed him, “I am Carlo Cimmino, Pietro Cimmino's grandson.”

“I know. I had recognized you. What do you want?”

“Revenge.”

“No. You are not seeking revenge. You seek emotions and to give meaning to your life by telling stories that you believe you have lived, but which do not belong to you. You think you can solve your problems by taking on the injustices suffered by your parents and all their unresolved issues, that your life is a continuation and appendage of theirs, but you are wrong. You believe you can erase what has been and rewrite the story at your pleasure, or at least you delude yourself into writing a good story for once to be satisfied with and exclaim - Oh damn, this time I finally did something right! But you are just a fool, Carlo Cimmino. Everything that is past has already happened, and even if today’s society seems monstrous to you and you feel there is no justice in this world, that this time is not yours, all you have in your hands is the present and a future yet to be written. Just as your grandfather Pietro and your parents before you have written and lived their life, made of failures and disappointments. But it was still worth it. Life is still worth living, and those like you, Carlo Cimmino, who do not have the courage to live theirs to the fullest make me disgusted.”

It was a moment. The old man stood up suddenly, spat on the ground, and smiled mockingly at me. The sky turned a purple hue and lightning and thunder split the clouds. The blood froze in my veins and my legs started to shake as my entire past life passed before my eyes, my grandfather Pietro Cimmino’s life, the fields of Georgia and the rooms of the Kremlin, Europe divided in half by an iron curtain and all the horrors of the nuclear explosions of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the mad depravations of the Nazi regime and the American troops' savagery in Vietnam. The old man's head deformed, distorted, and disfigured itself into growing to implausible and objectively unbelievable dimensions. Soon the old man took on the appearance of a gigantic and monstrous green ogre. Purple drool foamed from his mouth, and he laughed, voicelessly, with a sound that must have been too terrible and which I could only imagine.

He devoured my head, before everything returned as before and at Duel Beat, they started letting people in. It must have been around midnight.

Reviewer’s Note

All the facts and people recounted in this page indeed existed. Including me. Some only in my head. But better than a kick in the ass.
That night Il teatro degli orrori took the stage in my city, at Casa della Musica rather than at Duel Beat. Whoever was there, and someone was there, says that it was a great time and they enjoyed themselves.

I wasn’t there. Apparently, I went to the wrong place.