1.
The alternative avant-garde gives no group discounts, the avant-garde strikes hard, to the quick, that’s why it’s feared, get out of the avant-garde’s way you shit-headed public!
These demented little lyrics earmarked for the head of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) are revolting. The performing artist is Freak Antoni, singing in Bologna’s revolt-filled nights. The head of the PCI is looking at the train tracks below the People’s House in Via del Faggiolo. They’ve told him the revolt is over, shunted to a dead track, and on that siding the extremists have taken a secret train to an unknown destination, all of them having faded away by now, all but one. He’s still in Bologna, Freak, Freak Antoni, Roberto Freak Antoni of the Skiantos punk band. He knows all about the side-track to nowhere, knows exactly how things went with that train. Scores of years later the baby-pitched voice of Freak pulls you towards that siding. It makes no difference whether you’re from Turin or Palermo. Every now and then a secret train still runs by Bologna.
It stops at the siding in Via del Faggiolo. A man of diminutive stature in full evening dress invites you to descend from the carriage and enter a white building where a secular, suffering olive tree grows. Not a soul is about. It was built on the ruins of the People’s House, the place where the head of the PCI left to track down rebels. The small man in formal attire offers you the typical breakfast for a passenger on the side-tracked train. It’s two little Hitler and Mussolini Blues-Brother cakes. When a voice intones being intelligent in Italy is not in good taste, you must start eating from their heads down to the very last crumb. That’s all.