Pier Vittorio Tondelli
Un Weekend Postmoderno

From the early '80s, I distinctly remember one thing: underneath the terrace of my house, there was often a white Vespa parked, with a faded sticker on it with the words "The Clash", which I couldn't understand, partly because it was written in the strange language of the Afi soldiers who sometimes roamed my neighborhood, staging impromptu basketball games on a concrete space visible from the windows of my room, and partly because it was full of odd "h"s placed beside unexpected letters, in an era when the "h" almost always followed the "c" in "perché".

On the other hand, it was the era of my first "whys," but the questions I asked myself, the inquiries I raised at home, were much more concrete than the meaning of the mysterious word "Clash", and didn't go beyond the request for a ride to the playground, or to the amusement rides on the early autumn Saturday afternoons, in conjunction with the important provincial fair and the arrival of many people in the city where we had to live then.

Over the years, my inquiries have gradually become different, perhaps more complex but ultimately always connected to the desire to do, or not do, something, only now the games, the playground, watching the trains leave for Milan or Turin on Sunday morning, are no longer part of the equation, replaced by other things.

It's been a while now that I think I've perceived the "why" behind the word "Clash": an epitome of my memories of that era, and at the same time message, almost prophecy, of a certain spirit of the times, and a vague enough sense of life: clash and encounter with people, ideas, places, feelings, milestones, goals, returns, and new beginnings.

I've always fantasized about a return to the '80s, but with the mindset and ideas of today, to revisit what I sensed around me but couldn't understand, comprehend, and live: perhaps a return to deny myself the myth of childhood, and to rediscover that, beyond the terrace of my house, the world was certainly no better than it is today, and embellishing certain memories is just another way to escape and reconstruct a world that doesn't exist, a personal Wonderland, like the beautiful Alice in Tim Burton's not-so-beautiful film.

For a few months now, I keep returning more and more often to the '80s, reading in a disorderly, chaotic, random way, the sensations, emotions, and analyses of Pier Vittorio Tondelli, collected by Bompiani in a book whose title, "Un weekend postmoderno", is both effective and misleading, as there's nothing truly post-modern, one might say relative and ephemeral, in Tondelli's writings; and nothing that can reduce his pages to the rest of the weekend, to the stasis of certain Sunday afternoons - where, like the Count of "Azzurro" - all you do is wait for the train of desires, assuming you have the fortune to cultivate your own leisure without having to be at work.

It happens to keep this book on the nightstand, or on the hallway bookshelf, and read it at any moment of the week, even when I should be doing something else, randomly opening a page, or searching haphazardly for names in the analytical index - rich, real, useful, and not perfectly redundant, celebratory, as this part of books often is - thus following the stories of the '80s I didn't live, capturing the spirit of a time that, although I was in the world, was not yet mine, capturing a past that perhaps cultivated the seeds of our present or perhaps not, rather living the spontaneity of each possible present.

This is a book that talks to us about life, vitality of an era, making appear and disappear, almost like in a personal theater of the author, at once chronicler, mask, spectator, and lead actor, figures and characters who, in these pages, seem to eternally ride the wave of their youth, which never seems to break.

It's a joy for the mind, and sometimes even for the heart.

Thanks to Tondelli, I see Francesca Alinovi appearing, taken to explain the meaning of the growing Africanism of the early '80s suburbs, the contact between the tribal rhythms of the "Heart of Darkness" continent and the electronic taste of the metropolitan tribes disenchanted with the Indians of the late '70s: and so the Tom Tom Club or the Talking Heads that I listen to today, in 2010, because in the '80s they were too distant from me, are at the center of a scene better set than at the CBGB.

I read about the tormenting seasons of Roberto Antoni's demenzial rock, sometimes freakish, and the motto, perhaps still useful today, that the only uncontrollable violence is the violence of dementia, finding then a timely account of the early performances of Gaznevada in the Emilian province, amidst heat and mosquitoes, reconsidering, in the description of the irreconcilable contrast of the bell towers of Carpi and Correggio, or in the description of the high bell tower of Pordenone and its Complotto, the inspirations of certain contemporary artists: of those who sing to me of "all the other libertines/who have been/biodegraded", perhaps to be defused, or of those who, thinking back to the Arci circles of the time, talk about losers on stage and backstabbing bread eaters, concluding that "it then went almost luxuriously for everyone", including those Ligabue and Zucchero that Tondelli captures, at the start of their careers, in their still genuine desire for an America "here and now", epigones of Alberto Sordi, but also of so many yuppies of those years.

I also read about more minor, seemingly negligible stories, like the desire to form a punk band in Macerata - Gangway wanted - described to Tondelli by a fellow soldier, then no longer available and disappeared into the anonymity of a province that no longer wanted to feel anonymous, transforming it into an Italian Queens (and you can see that the people from Macerata have never been to the real Queens); like a trip to Udine and a train journey beyond the Tagliamento, towards these eastern Italian cities that are a kind of Bastiani Fortress, where the ex-marcom Tondelli goes in search of new underground fashions and trends, where you wouldn't expect them to be, but they are.

I randomly extract a page, and I see descriptions of the nightclubs of Rimini and the fun-seekers - to whom Facebook today seems to dedicate even "groups" - reflections on the nature of these places of vacation and Saturday night leisure, where the lights of nightclubs shine out of season, music hitting the walls, almost pushing away, in autumn and winter, the empty beaches, the closed umbrellas, sending tangos and mazurkas and accordions and more back to the past. The Riviera is also discussed in reference to Pasolini's vacations, his ties with other irregulars like Comisso and De Pisis, in passages where Tondelli's investigation confuses literary criticism, psychological investigation, subtle search for one's cultural roots and possible models to translate (and therefore betray), revisiting them in his journey through the Padana roads.

From Pasolini to Oscar Wilde, one ends up following the daring comparisons between Morrissey - the same late muscle-bound who today shows a senescent passion for an Italy aged quickly like him - and other maudits that were, dissecting his lyrics as if they were high decadent poetry, not missing a smile for a pop rock singer who wields flowers like they're a baseball bat.

A few seconds ago I read a page reflecting on the candid smile of Loretta Goggi.

Many, perhaps infinite, are the paths we can walk delving into this book that seems like a library, and many, as infinite as its possible readers, are the meanings we can attribute even today to each of these pages, according to our personal sensitivity and vision of things.

Ultimately, there's the awareness that Tondelli was endowed with a particular "grace": not the grace of someone who knows how to write well, a display of technique without soul; not even that of someone who can capture the essence of the matter, or touch caustic details of our existence until digging into us and making us suffer; nor the art of the storyteller, of someone who creates by more or less clearly detaching from the real.

Tondelli's grace is that of transforming small, negligible things into experiences that encapsulate the essence of an era, of making a small peripheral theater as important as Madison Square Garden (or the Roof Garden referenced by Elio e le Storie Tese in their first album of '89), capturing the wave of life at the moment it detaches from the mass of water, and rises without yet knowing it will crash, returning to the origin and disappearing into the all, the indistinct.

It's a situation that sometimes seems to me to relive, on certain winter evenings, at the end of some concert: we get into the car with our ears still ringing, unwrap the supporting band's CD bought for 8 euros, knowing that somehow we have to get back home, crack a joke, taken from the same Smiths so loved by Tondelli, that dying alongside someone else might be a privilege (or maybe not), waiting for the windows to defog.

If I were who I was in the '80s, I would wait for someone to drive for me: today I drive myself, and, in the wake of Pier Vittorio Tondelli, I reach home by randomly turning through the streets of my own or other provinces, sometimes hoping to get lost and waiting for that same grace to return to visit my eyes.

Sometimes, it might even happen. I hope that, every now and then, it happens to you too.