Roberto Freak Antoni died just short of age sixty on February 12 this year. One good thing about getting sick, really sick, he noted, was that it made him give up drugs. Antoni—or Freak, his moniker among legions of both young and aging fans—was by no means a role model, but a rock star and poet, and above all a deeply subversive figure in Italian literature and pop culture.
From Bologna, arguably Italy’s equivalent of Berkeley in terms of its bodies of intelligent, strident political and social dissidence, Freak was the founder of Italian “rock demenziale,” a term rooted in psychiatric diagnostic terminology (“dementia” and “demented”), for one, and also a loose translation from the cluster of English words orbiting around “freak”—freak out, freaky, freaks. The Mothers of Invention were no doubt being invoked somehow.
Who could not recall Frank Zappa’s caustic spirit in the title of one of Freak Antoni’s nine books of poetry (it is customary to pronounce both his adopted middle name and his last name together): Non c’è gusto a essere intelligenti in Italia—loosely translated: It’s No Fun Being Smart in Italy? Hard to render fairly, though: I remember a friend mocking the English word fun once. “Fun!” she said, making it into a weird pinging sound. “We have more syllables in our word for it, divertimento, than you have letters in yours.” The book’s title carries a sense of defeat, of desuetude. It might have been worthwhile to be intelligent in Italy once, the title seems to say, but the thrill is gone. As another friend of mine once put it, “Italy is a country that used to be modern.”
From his earliest years as a performer, Freak Antoni had a barbed relationship with his audience. In 1979, the band went onstage and didn’t play a note. They just started cooking spaghetti. That moment—the long, boring minutes occupied with waiting for the pot to boil and the noodles to cook—is more than cliché. It’s a key social experience in Italy, especially among penniless young people. I remember a roommate who used to get emotional in the last few seconds before the spaghetti was ready, and it was time to drain it—them, spaghetti is always plural in Italian—and eat. He’d sort of laugh and cry together, muttering mamma mia, mamma mia over and over again, until the food made him finally shut up.
When the audience began booing and filing out of the arena, Freak Antoni shouted at them: “Questo e’ avanguardia, pubblico di merda!” : “This is avant-garde art, you shitty audience!” As Frank Zappa himself once said: “My audience wouldn’t know music if it bit them in the ass.”
Freak Antoni was right. It is hard to enjoy being intelligent in Italy. The proverbial preverbal pleasures are boundless—the food, the scenery, the clothing—but when you get down to the way the country actually works, fools and mountebanks seem to rise to the top, and the truly intelligent seem perpetually out of luck. Perhaps therein lies the dementia in Freak Antoni’s “rock demenziale.”
His group was called the Skiantos, and the name says a lot. In Italian, a “schianto” is a number of things: it’s a collapsing disaster, but it’s also the effect of a spectacularly beautiful girl. It’s something that’s so much fun that nothing’s left standing, but it’s also the heartbreak that marks the aftermath. What about the “k” in place of the “ch”? Well, it might have been a hopeful placeholder for international renown. After all, Italians regularly hear Americans pronounce “brusketta” with the soft “s” of shoe. But more likely it was out of an Alfred Jarry-esque schoolboy love of weird erudition. In medieval Italian, the “k” often took the place of the “ch,” and beginning in the sixties, it was a signature consonant in graffiti, allegedly used by anarchists, yippies, and punks. “Down with Amerika” used to festoon the walls of Italian cities during the Vietnam War. The head of Italy’s police ministry Francesco Cossiga became “Kossiga,” often with lightning-bolt s’s, in reference to the Gestapo.
Freak was famous for his witty one-liners, which occasionally rose—or sank—to the level of aphorisms. “It’s important in life for others to meet you halfway. That way you know which way to move so you can avoid them.” Or: “People say that once you hit bottom, there’s nowhere to go but up. Or you can do what I do: start digging.”
But his best-known line expresses a grim pessimism embodying the deep Italian left-wing conviction: if the Italian political system is forbidden from producing another Mussolini, in its endless creativity, it will come up with something like Berlusconi.
That line was: “La fortuna è cieca, ma la sfiga ci vede benissimo…” The saying’s first half is pretty straightforward: “Luck is blind.” In Italian—the language of an animist culture—“Fortuna” may be the goddess of good luck, but bad luck has a goddess too: “Sfiga.” The term is vulgar and describes the absence of all that is worth living for. A “hot babe” in Italian is a “figa,” a term both specific and anatomical. Add an “s” to the beginning of a word, and you negate it. “Sfiga” is desolation, an empty piazza. And so, the second half of the axiom: “But bad outcomes have 20/20 vision.”
One of Freak Antoni’s contemporaries, brilliant cartoonist and publisher Filippo Scòzzari, once featured an earnest, socially conscious, and deeply ridiculous Italian publisher in a cartoon. The publisher was portrayed as small pink pig, wearing a fedora and wagging its curly tail; towering over the pig with a scythe over one shoulder stood the goddess “Sphyga.” (Note the lampoonish Americanization of the spelling, so that it’s pronounced to near-rhyme with “tiger”). “Bertani,” intones the grim goddess, “I am the terrifying goddess Sphyga. What have you done to honor me lately?” The pig replies, fearful but anxious to please, “Well, I did publish a book about…” Before he can finish the sentence, the Goddess of Bad Outcomes thunders her approval: “BENISSIMO!”
The poem presented below is from Non c’è gusto a essere intelligenti in Italia, and it’s dedicated to Andrea Pazienza, a kindred spirit and fellow junkie. Yes, because Freak Antoni was another victim of the demon junk. It was (is?) hard to avoid heroin in Italy. After all, the government has always had an ambivalent relationship with the Mafia, and Sicily was the epicenter of a three-way trafficking network: absorbing opium from the east, refining it into heroin, and shipping it westward. Money poured in from both directions.
So in the 1980s the cities of Italy were awash in heroin. Smack was a little bit like Coca-Cola in Atlanta. An Italian almost felt patriotic shooting up. The Milan of the go-go eighties was featured in a slogan for an aperitif: “Milano da bere”—roughly, “What Milan Drinks.” Almost instantly, that slogan morphed into a popular graffito: “Milano da pere”—“How Milan Shoots Up.”
Andrea Pazienza sketched a famous Christ on the Cross, a long-haired freak nodding off into His all-too-human death throes. Instead of a cross, though, the upright and cross bars were a giant syringe. That’s a visual joke we can be sure Roberto Freak Antoni laughed at, or sort of laughed and cried, muttering mamma mia, mamma mia to himself under his breath.
***
DYSPHORIC ONE
4 masks seated around
a table in a tavern
acting out their threadbare frenzies
Bursts of flat laughter shred the soul
Did you hear I had a nervous breakdown, but
now I’m completely recovered???
I don’t get where to put my world
or where I’m supposed to be
I wrap my lips around
this final curse.
Time to sleep. So long.
Leave me money for the rent
My heart is so completely spent that
I’m left with this
intolerable
pain.
When’s the
last train
4 Rovigo???
Mamma:
forgive me.
***
Antony Shugaar, Asymptote Italy editor-at-large, is the author of Coast to Coast and the coauthor of Latitude Zero: Tales of the Equator. He is a translator: among his most recent titles are The Crocodile by Maurizio de Giovanni, Resistance is Futile, by Walter Siti, and Other People’s Trades and If Not Now, When? by Primo Levi. He is working on a book about translation for the University of Virginia Press.