WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE

WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE

No need to argue: everyone knows ZOMBIE of The Cranberries.

I can’t simply call it a song, to me it’s history.
It has recently exceeded one billion views on YouTube and I admit that some are mine.
A deserved success, which closes the circle of the previous song of the year proclamation at the 1995 MTV Awards.
Zombie was shot by Samuel Bayer, who also made the video of “Smells like teen Spirit” to be clear, but more than the undoubted quality, I would linger on the message and on the voice of Dolores O’Riordan.
Unfortunately now the first thing that is mentioned everywhere about her is the circumstance of death, but I would like to talk about life.
Not of her biography in detail, but I would particularly underline how she wrote this piece in a flash, after learning of the tragic death of two kids from a bomb.
Although the episode took place in Ireland in 1993, a specific sadly known context, Dolores has always avoided politicizing.
“In your head, in your head” Dolores repeats it, she invokes, she invites to think, it would seem banal and yet too often it is not.
Hers is a cry to unite, to awaken.
“Violence causes silence.”
I find that Dolores knows how to make this silence speak, she knows how to give voice to pain, she knows how to shout not anger, but the strength to say enough.
Zombie is against violence, against the inability to stop violence.
This song’s our cry against man’s inhumanity to man; and man’s inhumanity to child.”
Dolores O’Riordan

I don’t know about you but as far as I’m concerned, the thought comes loud and clear and settles viscerally.
Her “another mother’s breaking heart” becomes mine.
Her voice, her unique way of singing, constitute the focal point: a catalyst, which allows the message to communicate all its disruptive despair.
Zombie was inspired by a child’s death. His life was taken in the arm’s of his mother. She was shopping in London last year, and there was a bomb planted in a rubbish bin in London and he happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time and he died. The reason the bomb was planted was because of a political territorial kind of thing that goes on in the North of Ireland and the UK. So the references to 1916 was when a contract was signed, which signed away the 6 counties to England. And it still goes on today: the war, the deaths, and the injustice.”
Dolores O’Riodan

Zombies who see and feel pain, yet do nothing.
Zombies not from horror movies and yet terribly scarier: us.

COFFEE AT TIFFANY’S

COFFEE AT TIFFANY’S

I had other things in mind for today’s coffee, but honestly now I feel a strong need for lightness.
So who more than Audrey can represent the personification of lightness without ever being superficial and without taking anything away from the seriousness of the challenges life poses?
I am not talking about only to her characters: her personal journey is also a great example of strength, balance, and tenacity in all the stages she has gone through, in all the decisions she has made, while maintaining and defending her privacy.
Her style is to subtract, she taught us the value of the essential.
In these days, everything is screamed, every declaration amplified by the big chests of the desire to arrive first. It no longer matter whether true or false, no matter what it will entail or what reactions it will provoke, it is published everywhere, and then the consensus starts.
The damages are not taken into consideration anymore.
Why cannot we do it in civil conduct?
Elegance is not only image, elegance is also a way of being, behavior, as well as bearing.
And for me, today, elegance is also civic sense, and respect.
Among the many anecdotes about Audrey Hepburn, I would particularly like to mention the one related to the wedding dress donated. In 1952, the marriage to Lord James Hanson was canceled few days before the established date. The dress for Audrey made by the Fontana sisters is ready and of course, it is gorgeous. Such a pity. Audrey then orders that it be donated “to the most beautiful, poorest, Italian girl whom the Fontana sisters will be able to find“.
Beyond the fact that it sounds like a fairy tale, the concept is: if I cannot have or cannot do something anymore, it does not mean that I should also preclude it from others.
Here it is the thought I would like to leave today.
And then:
remember, if you need a hand you’ll find it at the end of your arm. As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself, the other for helping others. “
Audrey Hepburn

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