Lampoon Magazine International Issue 15

Borghese può essere inteso con un’accezione negativa – diceva Moravia: un’attenzione convenzionale a dettagli relativi. Il borghese vuole sentirsi parte di un gruppo, in una società codificata sull’agio – piuttosto che sentirsi isolato e in qualche modo diverso o speciale. «Cuore? Quale cuore? Quella roba che serve a pompare veleno». Io sono cresciuto lottando contro il mio contesto borghese – così come tanti altri, cercando la poesia. Oggi comprendo che la mia educazione di ragazzo per bene, appunto inserito in un contesto di buone maniere, borghese, definisce un’appartenenza alla storia della città di Milano. Immaginiamo una conversazione impossibile – quando a riprendere il discorso dovrebbe appunto essere Alberto Moravia: «Le cose peggiori, le vedevo in quella donna. Era avara, inibita e omofoba, rigida, snob, ignorante e sempre convinta, convenzionale e…

The word bourgeois can carry a negative connotation; as Alberto Moravia put it, a conventional attention to relative details. A member of the bourgeoisie wants to feel part of a group, in a society with a code of values based on affluence, rather than feel isolated and different or special in some way. “Heart? What heart? That thing used for pumping poison.” I grew up in a bourgeois setting, and fought against my background by turning to poetry, like so many other people. Today I understand that my upbringing as a “nice chap,” part of a well-mannered milieu, bourgeois in fact, defines my belonging to the history of the city of Milan. Let us imagine an impossible conversation, with Alberto Moravia picking up the subject again: “I saw the worst…

Massimo Listri is a figure with a thousand elusive virtues. It is difficult to follow his steps and progressions, hard to interpret his visionary developments and passions – in particular related to collecting – whether they have been cultivated forever or are as sudden and violent as waves in a storm. His emotional temperature, expressed however by a waxy coldness, is always extreme and implosive. Massimo reminds us of one of those characters that emerge from the Caravaggio-like chiaroscuro of the paintings by Mathias Stomer, Bartolomeo Manfredi or Dirck van Baburen. Contours suddenly whipped by beams of livid, nebulous light possessed by evanescent lemures, by fleeting electrical apparitions. Listri – born in 1953 under the sign of Aquarius – has a thousand nuances of existence and curiosity, a thousand evolutions…

In the frosted glass that covers the luxurious and extravagant buildings designed by architect Freddy Mamani, Bolivia’s recent past and its new bourgeoisie are reflected. The change began in 2006, when Evo Morales won the presidency Jeaneth, Mineyva and Liceth always arrive half an hour late for the class that Doña Rosario Aguilar holds every Saturday afternoon in a lounge of the ancient Hotel Torino, in the centre of La Paz. They don’t say hello, they laugh, they gossip and spend another quarter of an hour locked in the bathroom getting ready - alpaca shawls around their shoulders, fastened with jewelled brooches, long braids to the waist and tilted hats, perfectly positioned. Now they are ready for Professor Ramirez’s class. Sometimes with patience, other times with irritation, but always without…

Sometimes, all it took was getting the form, posture or touch wrong. A handbag was bourgeois; a shoulder bag wasn’t. A buttoned-up blazer was bourgeois; unbuttoned it wasn’t It was the worst insult ever: “You are bourgeois!” There was no better way to offend someone with snide elegance, telling them at the same time, in the self-same breath, “you are a petty, thick-headed conventional small-minded materialist hypocrite and opportunistic bigot.” You just had to say it slowly, “you are bourgeois”, without a flicker of an eyelid (and so with the composure of the bourgeois), and you hit the nail on the head – also because the word sounds similar in Italian, French and English. 1968 not only proved how small-minded it was to be bourgeois, but also how dangerous…

Pablo Ruiz y Picasso. A giant, the Minotaur that casts its disturbing shadow across the art of the entire 20th century. Larger than life, possessing inexhaustible energy, a man that embodies expressive and existential evolutions, infinite and unpredictable. Picasso is a heroic and controversial figure of the 20th century, a subject of debate and progressive analysis, the focus of major shows, like the riverside exhibit recently inaugurated in Paris at the Musée d’Orsay, which focuses on the Blue and Rose period of his artistic career. Exhibitions that explore above all his vast body of pictorial works and his mastery of drawing and etching, throughout the various stylistic periods that characterized his development, from Bateau-Lavoir onwards. Picasso. La scultura : an exhibition at Galleria Borghese, sponsored by Fendi, about the…