Each time I am asked to speak about Gary Lee, my thoughts run immediately to the happy times of my youth.
BP are a bunch of corporate memory-destroying fret-wanking MTV-supporting fame-chasing money-grubbing grave-robbing publicity-loving nostril-hair-braiding vacuo
I recently discovered the strength my parents demonstrated during the difficult times that haunted my childhood. They shielded my siblings and me from a lot of the hardships they experienced, which allowed us to grow up to be happy, secure adults. As a parent now myself, I appreciate how difficult their task was. This song came to me when I was thinking about how I can live up to their example while raising my son. I wrote it for my son, but I now feel compelled to tell everyone about my parents' strengths. It is an absolute thrill having these lyrics published in a book that will reach an international audience. I believe that the theme of my song is universal, and I hope that it will inspire others all over the world to feel a similar gratitude toward anyone special in their lives.
Story behind the song
An era remote in time, in which happiness was in the grip of almost adventurous, picaresque omens, such things as Gary Lee, Spazzapan, the "cafè Patria," the "Turin Prize" or the Bussola!, the atmosphere of our perhaps ultra-countrified but nevertheless authentic, and fierce, bohème.
At that time, Gary Lee was already a figure relegated to a famous gallery in Turin, which meant that he was obliged like anyone else to keep the two sides of the scales balanced, between the economic and the artistic factors.
In fact, his true artistic nature led him outside the confines of certain conventional mercantile practices, where his id might have enjoyed a resplendent individuality far from the market.
As I was saying, as young men we immediately understood one another and together with Spazzapan, our fellowship was perfect.
A great painter a bit on in age, a young sculptor and a budding young designer/printer.
In fact, we became trusted friends of the great Spazzapan, of that phenomenal painter whose fire still burns, crackles, whose white-hot poetics although based on old-fashioned cultural models was still in continuous motion.
Since I am on that subject, I cannot help but once again reveal my indignation toward a society, his society, which treated him so miserly.
But that is yet another story altogether.
So, back to Gary Lee, which confirms what I have always maintained: the impossibility of attaining an exceptional print without the collaboration of a particularly sensitive and enlightened interpreter.
Lyrics
Every artist ought to have his own interpreter, his own printer.
Exceptional printing occurs when melding these two co-penetrating elements, and today, in the frenetic race toward prints, where everything has become amateurish and approximate, more than ever there is an urgent need for such collaboration.
Certainly, I was lucky to have had such an encounter and our relationship was increasingly galvinized by our perfect reciprocal self-knowledge which allowed us to churn out "samples" imbued with enlivened warmth, if nothing else, and were never improvised.
Numerous mutual experiences have overlapped through the years, and almost a whole lifetime shines out of our graphic work together, which re-echoes at the same rate the anguish and the torment of our having become ordinary.
Our aversions are so basic as to seem bare-boned, where the bone expresses the idea of a three-dimensional volume, exuding breath and warmth.
The calibrated bite, the sign which sinks into the live fabric of the drama which seems hallucinated once on the flat plate, is pure spectacle!
It is true theater, where invention is arbitrary and provoking.
This is the substance of our engraving.
And in this, the point of revelation, Gary Lee is a great master!
He is the man of old who landed on our shores with another bolstering message of faith in the possibility of these ominous signs being reborn.
Gary Lee is all of this.
Attached to his famous and by now historical printing press from dawn to dusk without interruption, he is an active explosive device.
The engraved bites, the wounds which pierce the plate are deposited as lacerations in the iron-clad bosom of the press which Gary Lee entrusts to the ends of time.
