Emanuela Acciari

La più grande giocatrice di calvinball di tutto il centro-sud, isole comprese.

[Emanuela Acciari @emamaravilla]

ho due biglietti per l’odissea di nolan (70mm v.o.s.) stamattina alle 10:45 al quattro fontane a roma…purtroppo non riesco ad andare, se interessati scrivetemi

[Assia Neumann Dayan @AssiaVonNeumann]

La notizia è che ho letto un libro
https://t.co/HgidFsc8u5

[la peau douce @la_peau_douce_]

C’è l’incertezza del futuro.

[Emanuela Acciari @emamaravilla]

tutto il thread

[orporick @orporick]

(Intervengo brevemente, con molti dubbi, sull'argomento del giorno. Non sono sicuro che sia proprio il caso, ma visto che c'è il festival probabilmente questo thread morirà giustamente nella sua irrilevanza. Premetto in ogni caso un gigantesco IMHO per tutto quello che segue.
->

[Emanuela Acciari @emamaravilla]

per la felicità dei cani carlofortini (e non solo) Richiedere un'area cani nell'isola - Firma la petizione! https://t.co/EQmtLVzYTm via @ChangeItalia

[Emanuela Acciari @emamaravilla]

@violalaviola in giro per la notte bianca, prendiamo tutta l’acqua del mondo in motorino, che si ferma, torniamo a casa fradici, niente luce, niente caldaia, niente di niente, non sapevo se ridere o piangere

[Gialappa's Band @GialappasB]

Forse non farò
cose importanti,
ma la storia
è fatta di piccoli gesti anonimi,
forse domani morirò,
magari prima
di quel tedesco,
ma tutte le cose che farò
prima di morire
e la mia morte stessa
saranno pezzetti di storia,
e tutti i pensieri
che sto facendo adesso
influiscono
sulla mia storia di domani,
sulla storia di domani
del genere umano.
Italo Calvino, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, 1947

#25aprile

[paolonori @paolonori]

Non è per via della gloria, che siamo andati in montagna, a far la guerra. Di guerra eravam stanchi, di patria anche. Avevamo bisogno di dire: lasciateci le mani libere, i piedi, gli occhi, le orecchie; lasciateci dormire nel fienile, con una ragazza.

https://t.co/WgqXGxkHeS

[andrea pennacchi @Pennacchiiiii]

Mio zio Celio: nome di battaglia: Vladimiro.
Con gratitudine.

[johnny palomba @johnnypalomba]

Buona festa di liberazione dell'Italia dal nazifascismo. Buon 25 aprile!

[Emanuela Acciari @emamaravilla]

@stoincasinata vado al cinema, al buio per un paio d’ore non so come e perché la tristezza per un po’ si allontana

[Emanuela Acciari @emamaravilla]

@tonytost shot 2 is "don't come knocking " movie poster

[2000s @PopCulture2000s]

today is the only day you can retweet this..

[Lercio.it @lercionotizie]

#ReferendumCittadinanza Fino al 30 settembre potete firmare online con SPID o CIE per sostenere la riduzione da 10 a 5 anni di residenza legale per poter presentare domanda di cittadinanza italiana.
Qui c'è il link! https://t.co/wAnYGgOfJV

[Guillermo del Toro @RealGDT]

We took a deek and a visit to De Quincey’s resting place… yesterday before leaving Embra. Love him so.

[Hanif Kureishi @Hanifkureishi]

A PAT ON THE HEAD

As Sachin and I are heading towards Brook Green with our dog Cairo, where we will have an ice-cream at the café and watch people playing tennis, he begins to talk about a new phenomenon called “rawdogging”. This formerly obscene term now refers to the practice of doing a particularly boring task without distraction. Whereas before – for instance on a long flight - you might have sought diversion by looking at your phone, playing a video game or watching a movie, you now do nothing in order to demonstrate masculine self-control.

I say to Sachin, ‘To me, it sounds like a form of meditation, emptying your mind until your busy thoughts and anxiety evaporate.’

Sachin says ‘Yes, maybe, but they’ve turned it into a kind of macho activity to see how much deprivation you can take. What ice-cream do you want?’

Unfortunately, someone I know has noticed me and is hurrying towards us. He works in the area, and has always been friendly, saying hello but no more than that. I don’t think I’ve seen him since the accident.

‘Hanif! I’ve been reading about you. I’m so sorry about what happened. How are you feeling?’

‘I’m glad to be home, at last, and pleased to be out and about, on a nice day like this.’

‘Good, good’, he replies. ‘And are you getting better?’.

‘I hope so. I’m not getting worse’.

At the end of this brief exchange, I introduce Sachin and they shake hands. Then the man looks me over in my wheelchair and notices that my right hand is encased in a splint, and that the fingers look stiff and immobile. For a moment he seems confused, but wanting us to part on a friendly note, he resolves to lean forward and pat me three times on the head.

Sachin is laughing as we move away.

I say ‘Jesus, in no other circumstances would that man have patted another person on the head’

‘Unless it was a child. Or a dog’, Sachin replies. ‘He meant it kindly though. He was at a loss. You should remember how difficult it is for people meeting you again, to know how to react.’

Returning to the neighbourhood as a disabled person after a year in hospital, I am keen to see the old places again. Brook Green, Ravenscourt Park, the cafés and restaurants, and of course the streets where I recognise familiar faces.

With each encounter, where I meet people I knew before my accident, I feel embarrassed, if not ashamed of my condition. I see their pity. I am presenting them with a tragedy, bringing bad news. This is awkward and difficult for me, seeing myself afresh in their eyes, and wondering what they see, think and feel. And it is their sympathy, particularly that of the women, which moves me.

Now, with the panting dog dragging us, Sachin and I cross the road, and head over to the Green where people are sunbathing, drinking and playing music.

While Sachin queues to get me an ice cream, I watch the children play tennis and think about the rawdogging challenge. Since my accident, I have been forced into a permanent state of rawdoggingness. I can’t use my hands, which unfortunately condemns me to thinking without distraction. If modern life is a machine for evading certain truths about yourself and your death-fate, I can no longer join it. I am compelled to be present. This can be either an pleasure or a torment.

Some disabled people might view the head-pat as a patronising slight. But, to my surprise, I find myself feeling sorry for my acquaintance and begin to think about the ambiguities of social etiquette.

Human beings don’t naturally fit together; to facilitate interaction, we must create a common language; often this can be awkward and difficult. There is a terror of faux pas, of etiquette scramble, of doing the wrong thing, and, in extreme cases, of social ostracism.

There is no set of rules for dealing with someone like me. I can’t shake hands or kiss hello. I can only offer my fist, which some people grab and others kindly bump. But often it’s clumsy.

Now Cairo, who has been watching Sachin with great attention, perks up as he returns with my ice-cream, some of which is in a little cup for the dog. Cairo buries his nose in the cup, covering his sweet face with the delicious treat.

Sachin and I go over the incident again; we can’t leave it alone. We wonder whether my acquaintance feels mortified. As a polite and kind man, he would never deliberately want to cause offense, would he?

Sachin says, ‘He’s probably punishing himself right now.’

I lick my ice cream. ‘Tearing his hair out.’

‘I can imagine how horrible that might be. I’ve done it to myself too, ruining a week in self-punishment.’

‘The punishments we inflict on ourselves are the worst. Maybe he’s the victim here’.

We laugh and put our faces up to the sun, and sit silently for a while, glad that we are us and not him. I look around, remembering it was here that Kier learnt to play tennis and later taught local children to play. Sachin and Carlo used to climb on the monkey bars. After my injury, having had to ‘rawdog’ through despair, I’m grateful for this moment, with Sachin and I sitting together, talking, kissing the joy as it flies.

[Emanuela Acciari @emamaravilla]

@bookivora orgoglio e pregiudizio
anna karenina
grandi speranze

[Emanuela Acciari @emamaravilla]

@rossa008 ti abbraccio forte

[Emanuela Acciari @emamaravilla]

cinematografari sempre

[Mattia Carzaniga @ilcarza]

Un bel piccolo film, esce oggi, ciao

https://t.co/nFfgsAIfGT

[Hanif Kureishi @Hanifkureishi]

OOH AHH CANTONA

My life through sport.

I wondered if we would ever do this again. Sachin, Carlo, Kier and I watching a Manchester United game in my living room. The dog barking randomly, knocking things over with its tail. Pizza on its way. Not unexpectedly, Wolves have equalised in the 93rd minute.  Before my injury, we gathered like this every week. I’m in a wheelchair now, the boys on the sofa beside me, their feet on the coffee table, and we’re threatening never to watch this crappy team again, which has become part of the ritual.

When I was a kid in the sixties, it was more or less impossible to watch football unless you went to the ground. There was barely any football on television. We could watch the World Cup, the Cup Final and other glamour games, but it was impossible to follow your team’s progress week by week, like we do now. Recently, looking through my diary of that time, I notice that among the five or six books a week that I read, many were autobiographies or biographies of sport stars, mainly footballers and cricketers.

At home, we received The Daily Express and The Guardian every day, and on Sunday The Observer, and my grandfather’s favourite, The News of the World. I was a big fan of sports writing and would enjoy reading accounts of football matches. My father had been a sports journalist, and my uncle, Omar Kureishi, was a famous cricket commentator in Pakistan, who had been, briefly, manager of the Pakistan cricket team, making Imran Khan captain.

My maternal grandfather, Edward Buss, who ran a second-hand antique and junk shop on Chatterton Road, Bromley, had several televisions piled up on top of one another. Only one of them seemed to work, and since he had obtained it from a fish and chip shop, when it warmed up, it gave off an awful smell of rancid oil.  The picture was black and white and fuzzy, and to get it going would require several bangs on its side and considerable manipulation of the aerial. Although we could only vaguely make out the shape of the game, you couldn’t really see the ball or the footballer’s faces.

In 1992, the French footballer Eric Cantona left Leeds United and was transferred to Manchester United for a fee of one million pounds. I can remember reading somewhere that Cantona had been in Lacanian analysis, which he claimed had been essential to him. He compared it to “having an oil change.” I was already mesmerised by this original man, who would take an easel and canvas out onto the pitch after training and paint the view. This new knowledge accelerated my interest in him. After all, how many footballers have had psychoanalysis?

For the first time, since the 1960s, when I had vaguely followed Spurs, I became interested in football again. As I didn’t have any mates to watch the games with, I would go to the pub on my own, sit on a stool with a pint of Guinness, and stare up at one of the screens, giving myself a neck ache.  I had barely been to Manchester, I knew nothing of the city or its people, but I learnt all I could about Cantona, his teammates, and the boss who loved him, the imperious Alex Ferguson.

The nineties was a relatively optimistic period in Britain, and Ferguson was building a great young team. Scholes, Giggs, Beckham, Keane, the Nevilles, Butt - known as the class of 92. In 1999, I was sitting in The Curtains Up, watching the replay of the FA Cup semi-final against Arsenal. Near the end of the game, we were down to ten men when Giggs picked up a loose ball in his own half, charged through the Arsenal defence and scored. He removed his shirt, swinging it above his head, and ran the length of the pitch in celebration.

Over the next few years, I followed the team fervently, and when I moved briefly to Richford Street, off the Goldhawk Road, there was a pub called The British Prince on the corner, which has now become an estate agents. It was literally ten yards from the house, which was convenient. And so, when I was babysitting at home, I could nip into the pub, watch a match for half an hour, and scoot back to the house to ensure my sons hadn’t died in a fire.

In the early 2000s, when the kids were older, and the matches were played on Saturdays at lunchtime, I would take them into the pub to watch some of those famous matches, when our rivalry with Arsenal was at its peak.  The pub was full of smoke and drunken people, often violent, loud and rude. Carlo’s first memories of Manchester United were made on those premises, watching Ruud van Nistelrooy, Manchester United’s brutal number nine, batter defences and score his goals.

Later, I would go to The Grove on Hammersmith Grove, with my ten-year-old, Kier, on Sunday lunch time. Kier would eat spring rolls and ice cream and we’d watch the matches together. By now, pubs in the area were gentrifying, they were serving food, mostly to middle-class young couples, and smoking was banned. This was the era of Cristiano Ronaldo, Rooney and Tevez, the most formidable front three in the league.

Around this time, I took the twins to Paris. They were young teenagers now, and becoming distant, difficult and sarcastic. I couldn’t keep their attention. On the Eurostar, they snatched the notebook in which I jotted down my everyday observations and drew a series of swollen penises. This notebook is now in the British Library. Fortunately, Manchester United were on a fantastic run in the Champions League, beating Roma three nil on aggregate. You can feel as if you are losing your kids when they become teenagers. They resent your authority and reject the mutual dependency you previously had. But my communication with the boys was saved by our connection to football – all of us luxuriating in the success of the team we loved.

Sunday mornings were terrible, driving the boys, and one or other of their friends, to an obscure football park in west London. There was no GPS in those days, I had an A to Z on my knee, and would stop for frequent fag and joint breaks en route, arriving at half time, much to the chagrin of the manager. I’d stand on the touchline in the freezing cold next to the other parents, who could be absolute scum, screaming vile abuse at the ref, and sometimes getting into actual fights. The desolation of middle-age; wondering if the best is over.

In 2011, I was at the San Sebastian film festival in Spain, promoting my film Le Weekend. I found a little empty bar that was showing the Manchester United-Manchester City match. I sat there alone, horrified to see us lose 6-1 to our crosstown, up-and-coming rivals. Sir Alex Ferguson retired a year later, appointing the dismal David Moyes as his successor. I was living alone in my house, Kier and his mother having left - taking much of the furniture with them - and the twins were away at university.

Since Ferguson left, following Manchester United has been a sorry tale of despair and defeat. My sons and I have continued to support our team, though my youngest son, Kier, has lost interest in football and become a vegan.

The decline of Manchester United has mirrored the way we feel about the country, in its waste and aimlessness, and the sense that what is gone is gone, nothing can be repaired now. Where other great teams like Arsenal and Liverpool halted their relative declines, Manchester United have failed to recover from the loss of their charismatic leader.

As Carlo and I talk through these memories, which are also family memories, we can measure out our lives in games and goals, tracking where we were, and what we were doing.  The story of Manchester United is also our family’s story. We align ourselves with our heroes, with those, like Cantona or Giggs, who might suddenly do extraordinary things in moments of transcendence. During those ninety minutes, you are, if you are lucky, entirely in the present, nowhere else but where you are – exonerated from the pettiness of everyday life.

It's the 97th minute of the Wolves game and the boys are putting on their shoes, readying to go home. Kobbie Mainoo, our eighteen-year-old midfielder – who I like to remind the boys is far younger than them, and earns considerably more – picks up the ball on the edge of the opposition’s box, nutmegs a defender and slots home, winning the game in the last second. Our threats to never to watch a game are retracted. We will back here next week.

February 24, 2024