19: Ruins
Its perhaps more interesting for me
to share the story of driving to the un-touristic towns in the middle of the night where we project our anxieties onto the dark and wake up beside an elementary school. Where the Sicilians who don’t perform the administration of Unesco sites raise their families. These are not old towns, to be sure, but they are not new towns either. In the morning, in the warm and satisfying din of school bells and commencement we make our way to a small strip of beach near a languishing port. A solitary figure sits beside a parked car, among the wild dogs, with a bluetooth speaker playing a small cathedral of affect. We watch from our walk as friends turn up slowly, and conviviality fills the pews. When our walk is done and his friends have departed, I go to say good morning. We’ve already exchanged smiles, and he reminds me of my grandfather. He offers me the usb key after I’ve complemented the music, and tells me about his wife who died. She was from Peru, and we speak in a combination of latinate languages, lively gestures and the warm ineffable.
Than to share about
Caraviaggio’s burial of Saint Lucia, made in frenzy of fugativity and ruination. We tracked it down in a church in Syracuse, where it sits dormant like a Malevich until you pop a euro in a slot and then it light ups while a little rooster of a father pecks at your ankles for getting close enough to actually see the surface of the painting. Its mastery and bad faith.
Though, I’d be remiss if I didn’t share
that it took some time for me to realize that the depictions of Lucia’s disembodied eyes that adorned the Syracusan churches where not the personifications of the agential force of the fleeting constituencies of their creators and hosts’ microbiomes.
And when I uploaded the usb key to a playlist on my laptop called Sicily Friend
I was surprised to learn it wasn’t only pining, saccharine, late-modern and sepia-tinged ballads of nostaglic yearing, like Dik Dik and Mina, that I could roughly intuit through affect more than language. There were J Balvin and Rosalía tracks, and a song called Gaia. The first song on the mix was Odisea from the Puerto Rican reggaetón artist Ozuna. I consulted genius.com (formerly rapgenius.com), the now largest repository of lyrics in the world, with over 2 million contributing scholars and learned that Odisea was about this:
[Intro]
Hmm no
No one knows what I've been through in this life
And I wonder every day
[Chorus]
What will become of me?If tomorrow I don't wake up
And God sends someone to look out for me
I would like to say goodbye before
But, what will become of me?
Who will take care of my family?
In this world of betrayal
Everything has been an odyssey
Tell me, what will become of me?
[Verse 1]
I was born in a circle of poverty
Everything was happy, staying happy was the skill
Grandma raised me, daddy died
Mommy was always with me
I swear I never needеd anything
I fit in with the 2000's era
Fan of music, talent dеfines me
Listening to great colleagues
Grandma said ''Son, you were born with skill"
In 2010, the street was my university
Learning about the bad, seeing falsity, evil
Observing how friends killed each other, snitched on each other
I wondered-
[Chorus]
What will become of me?
If tomorrow I don't wake up
And God sends someone to look out for me
I would like to say goodbye before
But, what will become of me?
Who will take care of my family?
In this world of betrayal
Everything has been an odyssey
Tell me, what will become of me?
[Verse 2]
December of 2014, Sophia was born, my greatest blessing
Me without a worry, my first song becomes a hit
God already has his mission with me, a creation
A natural style flows, with a heart with harmony
They talked down on me, but I stayed calm
And all of them were consumed by karma, uh
Now, a sensation and famous, without time for the important stuff
Sometimes I feel like crying, I see how I live among the bad
I'd like to return to my poverty
I begin to ask-
[Chorus]
What will become of me?
If tomorrow I don't wake up
And God sends someone to look out for me
I would like to say goodbye before
But, what will become of me?
Who will take care of my family?
In this world of betrayal
Everything has been an odyssey
Tell me, what will become of me?
[Outro]
First of all, thank God
For keeping me in good health and alive
For allowing us to make good music
Odisea, the album
Hi Music Hi Flow
Yampi
Chris Jeday
Gaby Music
Bless the producer
Dímelo Vi
For a good understanding
My music is enough for me
I had decided to make a short filmic response to the talk Federico Campagna gave in response to Abbas Akhavan’s curtain call, variations on a folly on the notion of ruins. I had been carrying some of the themes he raised through our trip and enjoying some of the recommendations he shared after emailing him impulsively from nearby the Villa Romana del Casale. It’s a film about ruins, of course, and also the feeling of listening to Anne Carson on an airplane. One of the great pleasures of editing is getting to listen to something you love over and over while it thickens with meaning.
