As much as Larry Gopnik struggles to be a mensch (a serious man, guided by right principles) he’s constantly fed with temptations and mysterious bad events.  He tries his best to keep the family together and live straight, but there’s no end to his tribulations.

Larry is a professor of physics waiting to get promoted to tenured position but the school is getting anonymous letters slandering about him.  One of his students doesn’t know basic math and tries to bribe him for a C.  Instead of studying for the upcoming bar mitzvah, his son stole money to buy marijuana and is caught listening to the Jefferson Airplane during the Yiddish lesson. His daughter only cares about hairdo and also steals money to get a nose job. His brother is a parasite gambler who sleeps on the family sofa and spends most of his time in the toilet writing numbers on a book. His wife just announced – out of the blue – that she wants a divorce because she is now in a relation with a friend of them, the slimy Sy, considered a serious man by the local Jewish community.  The guy living next door tries to steal part of the lawn moving the border.  The attractive lady next door offers him marijuana and opportunity for easy sex.

In growing desperation, tormented by horrific nightmares, Larry seeks help from 3 lawyers and 3 rabbis, but none of them actually can or want to do anything useful.  They basically don’t care or – worse – they tell him non-sense stories about messages coming from God.  At the end of the movie, almost bankrupt, Larry eventually gives up and grants a C to the briber.  Soon after that he gets a call from the doctor: they need to talk immediately about something probably bad, perhaps a cancer?  And that is nothing, because all of a sudden a tornado is going to hit the school in a few minutes, destroying everything, including the American flag.

Unlike previous movies, this time the Cohen brothers decided to talk about their own culture, their heritage, the place in the mid-west where they grew up.  And the Jewish culture in this movie is uneasy, or should I say frightening?  Nobody will help you understand the will and the wrath of HaShem (=God), not even the Kabbalah, and the more you keep straight the more you will receive tribulations that you’ll have to swallow. There is no escape.  If you get on the rooftop you feel safe for a moment and perhaps you believe you eventually found some insight of what is going on around you, but that’s just one more challenge that’s coming.  There are smiles and laughs here and there but most of the movie you feel uneasy about what happens to Larry.

I’m certainly no expert in the Jewish matters as I ignore most of their culture and traditions, but the impression I get from this movie is about a crisis in their religion, struggling to keep up with modern times.  In ancient Poland living straight was so simple, even when you had to confront with dybbuks (=evil ghosts) you immediately knew how to deal with them.  Nowadays staying in touch with HaShem is increasingly difficult.

On the other hand, the resignation that guides Larry as he tries to take on his shoulder and accept all the bad things happening around him, as if they were something sent by God to atone the original sin, reminds me the lack of reaction in the Jewish people while nazis were progressively segregating them, taking possession of their property (just like the guy next door does with the lawn), up to the concentration camps.

Special mention to the first rabbi, interpreted by Simon Helberg, who is Wolowitz in The Big Bang Theory.

A serious man
USA 2009, by Ethan and Joel Cohen, Drama
IMDB 1019452

Part of my job is to select technical people to be hired in the company.  Few months ago I happened to interview a guy for a developer position.  This guy has a degree in chemistry but his career then oscillated between system administration and programming in the java world.

After a while talking about his experience he said that, being in his 30s, he was looking for some stability.  In particular, he said, he was frightened by how quickly our knowledge can become obsolete in the programming world.  For example in 5 years Java could become obsolete because everybody could move to the next big thing (.net, he said), making Java skills useless and forcing you to learn everything from scratch.  He added that system administration and programming skills in the open source world will last longer.

On one hand I agree: open source skills will last longer.  In the open source world we never have to push the new thing just to force everybody to buy the new version.  We’re not at the mercy of some company’s agenda.  We grow software incrementally, evolving technology on top of the existing good old stuff, with continuous innovation and experimentation patch after patch and using Darwinism to select stuff that works and re-use it forever.

On the other hand I think this guy doesn’t understand what programming is really about, on a deeper level. In our world technologies evolve very quickly.  Every day new emerging technologies provide better ways to do the same thing and even in the evolutionary open source world, we have to keep up with the fast-pace advancement.

That’s why good schools won’t teach you a specific programming language or a specific application or operating system.  Good schools won’t teach you the technology of the day.  They will teach you how to learn new stuff quickly, how to be your own self-teacher.  They will prepare you for a whole life of research and study.

As Jeff Atwood once wrote “how lasts about five years, but why is forever”

Last Tuesday night I attended a concert where Maggio Musicale Orchestra played Beethoven’s 9th Symphony directed by Zubin Mehta.  The concert was in Piazza della Signoria and was for free, so it was packed.  It was a very hot night but despite the sense of suffocation I was glad to be there cause the concert has been great.

After some initial synchronization problem – in the first movement where the orchestra wasn’t carefully following the director – they quickly knitted their sound and made an awesome ensemble.  I was particularly impressed by the sharpness of pizzicatos in the third movement.  Then in the fourth movement when the solo bass started to sing he took my breath away.  His voice was so powerful and determined that the walls surrounding the square vibrated and my skin was blown away.  The tenor, alto, soprano and the 100-people choir were also remarkably good while singing Ode to Joy, the amazing melody which is also famous for being the basis of the European Anthem.  As soon as the finale was over, every body stood up to clap their hands in a long ovation.

Of course, this wonderful music is even better when you listen to it in this open air space right the middle of Palazzo Vecchio, Loggia dei Lanzi, Michelangelo’s David and Uffizi.  I’m glad to live 10 minutes walk from there and it’s this kind of nights that make me glad the most.

The Hermitage Museum of St. Petersburg owns so many pieces of artwork that they cannot handle them all in one place. For this reason they routinely organize exhibitions abroad and opened a few branches around the world. They have one in Las Vegas, one in Amsterdam and recently opened a third one in Ferrara. To celebrate its birth, Italian Hermitage organized an exhibition dedicated to Benvenuto Tisi, also known as Il Garofalo, at the Estense Castle.

Benvenuto Tisi was born in Ferrara in 1481 and is one of the most prominent painters of the School of Ferrara. He began gravitating around Domenico Panetti, Lorenzo Costa, Dosso Dossi and then refining his style under with Boccaccio Boccaccino. He already had a distinctive style, with bright colors and strong use of light as it was common in the Venetian school, when he eventually visited Rome and met Raffaello. That was a breakthrough and his style dramatically improved, so much that out of Italy his paintings sometimes are mistakenly attributed to Raffaello, even if Garofalo kept a distinctive mannerism.

What strikes me the most in Garofalo’s paintings is the use of light/dark and bright colors to highlight the subject and yet the obsessive presence of background stuff, as if he were shy of wasting the corners of the canvas.  Also very interesting the ethereal mood his characters can express.

The exhibition also features a few paintings by Garofalo’s contemporary artists and the ticket includes a visit to the Castle. This alone would be worth the money. Several inner rooms were recently restored and feature astonishing ceiling frescoes and the atmosphere of renaissance lifestyle and parties. Just looking at the kitchen you get an idea of the huge banquets the Este family used to throw in their golden period, to say nothing of the Giardino degli Aranci or the underground Jail.

[Stefano's comment deserved a longer answer, so here is a full post on the topic.]

What is Art? Something difficult to define. Most say art should convey an emotion and I do agree with Stefano on this. There’s no need of understanding for emotional communication is something that usually doesn’t happen at the rational level. Trying to define art is mostly useless. Art just feels.

There are styles and languages with immediate and universal emotional effect. Everybody get the same instant feeling of aesthetic beauty when listening to Bach, even if they don’t understand how fugues work. Beauty is something mostly instinctive and doesn’t even require an artist. You could get the same feeling watching a sunset or a landscape. But then, in order to understand why Bach is beautiful you have to analyze your own emotions, the effect that Bach wanted to evoke, get to the inner logical and symbolical structure, see the fabric. At that point you understand what the artist intentionally tried to do. That’s the magic in art: the ability to intentionally evoke emotions and ideas.

There are styles and languages a little harder to understand. That’s usually not because they want to hide, or select their elite audience. That’s because the “a-ha” effect is a powerful emotion-generating device. When meaning and structure suddenly emerge, after some thinking our brain springs emotions. Take for example Escher paintings, or hermetic poetry. Sometimes even math equations can have an artistic effect, if you get to see the harmonic symmetry behind them. If you believe, you can even think they’re what God intentionally tried to create; his signature.

The greatest artists can combine several layers of meaning and symbolic languages so that, when enjoying their work, you get instant feeling but, if you persist, you can also get to the deeper layers and enjoy even more. I guess it all depends on the way human cognition works.

Yesterday I went to see Miró: la terra, an exposition dedicated to the Catalan artist held at Palazzo dei Diamanti. This was my second attempt with Miró. The first was many years ago – I was still in primary school – the teacher brought us to the exposition and tried hard to make us understand what’s behind the surface of such apparently simple and meaningless sketches. That time she failed. Luckily enough, now I’m grown up. After so many years, watching Miró’s painting had a totally different effect on me and, even if I know little about art.  At least this time I could appreciate the message conveyed.

The exposition is laid out in a way that allows you to follow the artist’s mental path while he mutated style and obsessions along his life. It goes from the usual detailed description down to the totally surreal, purely symbolic, conceptual, two-dimensional, synthetic and ironic deconstruction of both reality and painted art itself.

Most paintings are a little cryptic and require you to stare at them a few minutes before you begin to recognize all the symbols and why different materials were used to build that meaning. Look at this one, “Catalan landscape: the hunter” (from MoMA New York), painted in 1923-24 when the artist was in the early stages of his career. We see a rural landscape, with yellow sunny sky and unshaped land. That triangle on the upper left is the head of a man, with one eye, one ear, a strange hat (the traditional Catalan barretina), mustaches, beard, a pipe. His body is a vertical thin line ending in a squared thin line for his legs. Arms are rendered by a wavy horizontal. In his right hand is has a prey and in the left a smoking rifle. In the bottom part a big fish (a sardine, says the paint) is partly morphed in a lizard and tries to capture a fly with a long tongue.

Note how the artist hints us at the meaning behind symbols, using a surprisingly low number of carefully selected signs. That big eye, partly hidden behind what could be a tree with one single leaf, is looking at us. Is that Miró himself, amused by the feelings this painting generated in the watcher?

After having been to New York several times, I recently watched a movie shot in the city. When you recognize places you have been, the movie feels completely different, so I felt like watching some more and next in line came some classics like When Harry met Sally, Taxi Driver, and The Warriors.

The latter two in particular made me think. The New York they depict is very different than the one I visited.  They talk about a scary place where crime is commonplace, gangs fight to control their turf, whores tease on sidewalks, walking down the street alone at night is dangerous, and taxi drivers carry a gun and prefer to avoid some parts of the city.  Washington Square and Bryant Park were no-go areas for ordinary people.

Nowadays you’d never tell New York used to be like that.  As Travis hoped while talking with Palantine, they cleaned up the mess.  In one decade Mayor Giuliani and those who came after him made it one of the safest and cleanest places I’ve even been.

While writing this post I discovered after 29 years Paramount Pictures is re-making The Warriors movie and this time it’s going to be shot in Los Angeles.  It’s expected to hit the theaters later this year.

Exactly ten years ago, on Feb 9th 1998, Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond began the Open Source movement. It was just a different way to explain what had been already happening for quite a few years, and make it understandable for the business world. And it worked very well.

Building on the ground-breaking work of great leaders like Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, we laid out the software technology that leads many markets of today’s world, entering the mainstream. When I say we it’s because I have been an active contributor of this community and an advocate of the open source concept since the beginning.

Nowadays I use open source for everything, my parents use Linux on their desktop, my friends are eager to buy an Asus EEE and major governments have state funded programs to adopt or develop open source. Several open source companies are making billions and almost everybody is saving huge money just by using it.

The idea spread even out of the software world, generating parallel incarnations in the culture generation and distribution area. Try to imagine a world without open source: no Firefox, no Open Office, no MySQL, no OLTP project, no Asus EEE, no Creative Commons, no Wikipedia, no peer-to-peer. Lately, all the biggest innovations in the software world came from the open source community are were possible because of it. There are still are some areas where Open Source has to work in order to go truly mainstream, for example Desktop applications, but we can clearly see it’s going to happen sooner or later.

Thanks to Linus, Richard, Bruce, Eric, Larry, Guido, to friends at Ferrara Linux Users Group, and to everybody who helped and believed in this amazing challenge.  Where will we stand in 2018?  I can’t wait to see that.

parking lots are stackable and cars take elevators to save space, or when walking down the street you frequently see nail salons with (mostly) women lined up just behind the the storefront, their nails being taken care of. So here I am, back in this crazy place again. First thing I did after hitting the hotel was entering the nearest Starbucks and have a chocolate chip cookie and a “solo”. I felt like a junkie.

This time I’m staying in West Chelsea, just two subway stops from the office and none the less a totally different place. The hotel has been derived from a 19th century building, part of the General Theological Seminary. In fact breakfast is served in the refectory. Believe me, I can see the Empire State building from the window and still I feel far from that in space-time. It’s not a mainstream place and you need to walk three blocks and two avenues to get to the subway (blue line) but rooms have just been renovated and have all comforts for a very reasonable price. I discovered I’m close to the gay district (which is bad), but I’m also close to cool areas like Meatpacking and at least I have a decent room (last time I stayed at the crappy Pennsylvania hotel).

This season New York is freezing cold. Wind can make you cry if you walk against it.

Cooking is hard stuff. There are recipes out there that would take advantage of project management methods. Take for example Cappelletti in brodo, a soup you can have in Emilia Romagna. To make it you have to prepare a broth with beef, chicken, pork sausage and vegetables, than save the broth for later and grind the meat together with parmigiano cheese, some grated bread and a little nutmeg until you have a uniform compound. Then, you make a mixture with flour and eggs, stirring until you get a compact and dry but still soft yellow bowl of dough. Then you make it flat with a rolling pin and cut it in squares 4-5cm wide. Then you put a small take of meat compound in each square, bend it and close it with a clever usage of your fingers, in the typical cappelletti shape. Then you make it rest for 8 hours, to make it dry and solid. Finally, you cook it in the original broth. Since recipes like this can easily keep you busy for a couple days, you should better get organized…