This time we publish a nice page of Massimo Mantellini which we discovered thanks to friends of “Wild Trails” a think-tank in Rome, directed by Federico Chiacchiari, which publishes the most beautiful and odorous patina around (only on paper and alas only bimonthly) on cinematographic culture and many other cultures.
These are some pages taken from Mantellini's book Ten Gorgeous Dead Items, published by Einaudi (page 152, Kindle edition: 7,99 euros, barely two hours of reading).
Mantellini's ten splendid dead objects are: maps, telephone, pen, letter, camera, newspapers, records, silence and the sky. But for Mantellini there is still a splendid living object: the book.
We, however, Today we talk about records.
Everything was new, everything was perfect
Towards the end of the seventies, after a period of great disagreements, the artistic partnership between Lucio Dalla and the poet Roberto Roversi, who had signed Dalla's song lyrics for many years. The reasons for mutual misunderstanding today do not concern us.
What interests us is that at some point, suddenly, the musician, clarinetist, singer, composer who has practically never written the lyrics of a song in his life and who has never finished high school, has to make a decision.
For some reason we don't know he takes the plunge, he chooses: he writes the first real song lyrics of his career. He does it in 1977, on a record with a strange cover of sea, earth and sky.
Whoever put that vinyl on the turntable for the first time in those days, lowered the needle and sat down waiting for the first notes, would first listen to a guitar, then a bass, then the whistle of a melody.
And then the voice of Dalla who, coming out of nowhere, starts singing the words of How deep is the sea which he wrote himself.
Finally, everything was new. Everything was perfect.
Ditto
Something similar happened just under a decade later, still in the Italian music scene. Lucio Battisti, orphan of Mogol's texts, in 1986 he published the first album of the new artistic life together with the poet Pasquale Panella. The song that opens that record, titled Don Giovanni, could easily be the soundtrack to this book and is called The things they think.
At one point, after referring to a poem by Giorgio Caproni in the incipit of the piece, Panella declaims and Battisti sings that certain things prolong you.
Finally, everything was new. Everything was perfect.
A clumsy object
Novelty and perfection have been enclosed for a long time in an object with very questionable aesthetics. Today we tend not to consider it too much, also because in the meantime that object has embarked on a path of rebirth that associates it with other symbols of a recent past: such as certain cars, certain televisions, certain lamps, some other iconic objects.
The affective charge that we have deposited over such things that prolong you has played an important role in this.
The black vinyl record, in any case, however you look at it, it remains a piece of plastic with an awkward and cumbersome shape: it is too big, thin like a margherita pizza, fragile, attracts dust, very easy to scratch, to be turned over after thirty minutes of listening . In hindsight a sort of Caporetto of post-war design and ergonomics.
… but with a sense
Il record player, with its very thin tip to be placed delicately between the grooves, it is his blood brother; and record washing machines, expensive pressure washers for audiophiles intended to buffer the uncertainties of design, are the inevitable consequence.
Despite these limitations, the record was a powerful sentimental object, a repository of dense information much of which, at the time, was not otherwise available.
The black plastic often included song lyrics and studio photos taken during the recording. All images to be analyzed with care: like the rigid cardboard that protected the disc and brought to our attention photos, artistic, memorable graphics that gave meaning to that cumbersome format.
… and also identity
In short, vinyl offered "handholds" that none of the subsequent supports will be able to make available with such abundance and effectiveness. In addition, the album cover aged over time, could be used for notes, stained with drops of morning coffee.
Within this process of enlargement of one thing that contains other things, there was our space to develop a path of identification: every record we loved and lost, during a move, at the end of a relationship, due to an unpaid loan, became the our orphan object (Remo Bodei would say), a part of us that ended up elsewhere and that silently survives there.
… like the madeleine
My personal madeleine of vinyl records is the first album by Peter Gabriel of 1977. Together with the songs of an artist that I loved very much, there was, among the "handholds", that blue photo on the cover.
The young man, the artist, is bent over inside a car beaded with rain, his face is barely visible, as if he was protecting something; the car is a Lancia Flavia owned by the photographer, the photographer is Storm Thorgerson, who with the Hipgnosis studio has produced the graphics for dozens of memorable records in the history of rock.
[…] Gabriel's first album with a blue cover, which I turned over in my hands a few minutes ago, is one of those things that prolong me: they will continue to do so even when I'm gone. And not just for the music it contains.
But what does support have to do with music?
[…] It is certain that, whatever the reasons for vinyl's departure, the heir that has taken its place, the audio-cd, possessed even worse defects.
Songs have their own sentimental charge, which is independent of the support - this is demonstrated by the fact that today, in the historical moment in which the de facto support has just disappeared, music is among us even with greater strength and centrality.
But the technological choice to rely on CDs can be read as typical of its historical period, when, at a certain point, towards the end of the last century, something that I would call a technological fideism and imagined that he ruled the world.
So where is the problem?
What was the problem then? A certain widespread dehumanization of relationships, including that with objects, mediated by technology. A leap forward, admirable in its aspirations for renewal, but not supported by the intellectual skills to best manage it.
The culture industry that suddenly found itself enveloped by the dictatorship of bits without possessing the tools to master it.
So when the major record companies decided to convert their customers to new media, in which we could find more music, more easily usable, images and videos and who knows what else, they didn't realize that something important was missing there.
The result is the audio-cd, a completely non-affective object perhaps required by the times, but cold and tidy like the dominant logic.
Technology can be inscribed in art
Steve Jobs once stated that his idea of innovation was to preside over a crossroads: the one - he said - between technology and the liberal arts. It is in this fundamental intuition, which no technologist has understood for a couple of decades, the profound reason for Apple's great success.
Having understood – long before anyone else – that technology alone is not enough, which if it doesn't respond to a need, and in the information society such needs are almost always cultural and complex, is destined to turn into a vacuum cleaner: a tube that sucks something from one point to spit it out in another.
The fundamental question that the technology that produced CDs should have asked itself in those days was: Do certain things prolong you? Unfortunately, however, the liberal arts for a long time, and to some extent even now, have been expelled from reasoning about innovation because they were considered unsuitable and outdated.
Excerpt from: "Wild Trails”, no. 9, 2021, p. 10-14.
