Thanks for the reference to DeLillo, Marco. I never read any of DeLillo’s books, but I read the synopsis you posted here, and intuit myself what DeLillo was taken by. (The “Point Omega” book cover is not unlike your Möbius strip word bubble symbol for “Infinite Conversations".) Like I wrote, it’s been a while since I’ve seen any of Antonioni’s films, but I’ve retained a sense of their quality. It’s a poetry of emptiness, of spaces, but paradoxically, space being space, one has this correlating sense of possibility. You see a space: anything could happen in it. It becomes a game-board for strategic moves. Rules of behavior are implied the more formal the setting. It’s hard to describe, but there’s a level of beauty in Antonioni’s films too, in the starkness. Maybe not for everyone. Not everyone would “get” it. Modernity has hermeticism, is a whole system which generates interpretation. Its machinery produces signs for interpretation, endless interpretation, not conclusions and solutions. You can see the entropy built into this, or the idea of the infinite loop. For humans, despite the keeping up of appearances, in this is inevitable exhaustion, weariness. I think Antonioni’s best films are in black and white. The formal level, the framing of the spaces, is where the beauty is, and it’s an intellectual beauty, any pearls of wisdom found in the grinding of the cerebral mind. It’s a world where the dominant feeling is that inaction, strangely, is to survive, and to act is to perish, a world dominated by appearances. There’s this level operating in Antonioni of classical photography, the beauty of static images. To act is to throw a stone into the water, stirring up mud, disrupting the clear reflection of the surface. It carries this function, perhaps, of showing how alien beauty can become, how estranged from it we can become, not feeling like we’re participating in it. I’ve read his films described as mood pieces, conducive to contemplation. Not linear narratives.
I listened to some of Caetano Veloso’s older stuff from the late sixties. I like it. Interesting blend, exotic but not too far out, but definitely a kind of scrambling of codes in what it blends, while retaining popular appeal, with some sensuality in the rhythms and romance in the currents, with wistful and melancholy shades; also celebratory I think. The sound of old recordings can’t be beat in my opinion. It’s a marvel to me that this caused protests from student purists or leftists, or whatever that was. I’d have loved to witness this spectacle (as written in the Wikipedia entry): "Dressed in a shiny green plastic suit, festooned with electrical wires and necklaces strung with animal teeth, Veloso provoked the students with his lurid costume, his sensual body movements and his startling new psychedelic music, and the performers were soon being bombarded with loud insults, jeers and boos from the students, who became even more incensed when American pop singer John Dandurand made a surprise appearance on stage during the song.”
I was trying to find footage of the concert where protesting students in the audience turned their backs to Veloso and his band, then his band turns their backs on them. "As the performance continued, the students pelted the stage with fruit, vegetables, eggs, paper balls and anything else that came to hand. Veloso then stopped singing and launched into an impassioned monologue, in which he excoriated the students for their conservatism. After being joined by Gilberto Gil, who came on stage to show his support, Veloso finished his diatribe by telling the students “… if you are the same in politics as you are in aesthetics, we’re done for!” and declaring he would no longer compete in music festivals. He then deliberately finished the song out of tune, angrily shouted “Enough!” and walked off arm-in-arm with Gil and Os Mutantes.” That’s fantastic! I wish there was footage of this somewhere. Listening to some of this music, this kind of reaction from a large segment of the crowd is amazing to me, because the music itself doesn’t seem so threatening to me. I used to slam-dance in mosh pits and stage-dive when I was a teen. The threat perhaps is that the pop element added to the traditional was perceived to be like the adding of artificial sweetener or high fructose corn syrup to drinks, a presentiment of the fast food culture and “dumbed down” popular entertainment we’re awash in today?
I could tell you my first impression when I did a google search of Veloso, and seeing photos of him today, any kind of revolutionary political activism he had in his impulses when he was young appears to have given way to a comfortable life for himself, and celebrity status. I wonder if in any way it’s like that phenomenon of hippies in youth, passionately counterculture, growing older, having kids, having to get a good-paying job, finally finding themselves an entrenched part of the establishment they railed against when they were young.
Of course I’m not sure, this being new to me, but there appears to be a lot to explore in Veloso’s output as a musician, but his piece “Michelangelo Antonioni” you posted seems a slight departure for him, a stripping back or simplifying, to suit the song to the subject. It’s a beautiful song. It has something of the vibe of soundtracks of old italian giallo movies to me. When the xylophone is introduced I think of the hidden loneliness and sadness of individuals who can’t get beyond small talk at a cocktail party.
The lyrics of the song “Michelangelo Antonioni” translated into english:
"A sight of perfect silence
An empty corner
A page without a word
A letter being written on a torso
Of marble and thin vapor
Oh love love
Is this the open window
A sight of perfect silence
An empty corner
A page without a word
A letter being written on a torso
Of marble and thin vapor
Oh love love
Is this the open window "
“Evening on Karl Johan Street” by Edvard Munch