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I am back from no man’s land and fully connected to the real world -again. I wish I could totally disconnect from all the bad news but it is simply impossible… Unless I lived in a cave, like a troglodyte. Anyway. I have been writing a lot those past weeks and what was once a script has become a book. I realized each scene was so detailed that it would be too frustrating to cut them because a script needs to be clear, without extra long descriptions (but mines are not as long -nor as good- as Flaubert’s ones). So I rewrote the whole thing and the script should be released as a full book, although it may change, I don’t know yet. I guess I got so inspired by my ‘retreat’ I couldn’t stop writing, the flow of ideas just kept coming… Good thing! But I didn’t spend all…⇒ READ MORE

Last time I talked music was in my post about Hugh ‘Peanuts’ Whalum. In this post I mentioned some of the singers I enjoy the most listening to and the very cool Dean Martin was one of them. First time I heard Martin’s sublime voice was on a CD, singing with Rat Pack friends Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis, Jr. Two decades after I listened to him for the first time, his easygoing attitude and velvety voice still captivate me. But Dean Martin is not only a voice as some of my friends may think. In the late 1940′s he formed a music-comedy team with Jerry Lewis, he was an actor in Rio Bravo, Toys in the Attic, Ocean’s Eleven (starring the five Rat Packers, in the original movie of 1960) to name a few, and he also hosted a successful TV show in the mid-1960s: The Dean Martin Show….⇒ READ MORE

Summer time has come and with it, vacations for many people. Maybe it’s time for me to be more ‘epicurean‘ on this blog. Each country has great places to stay, such as two specific regions in Northern Italy (since I barely know Southern Italy -for now): Emilia-Romagna and Lombardia. First time I went there it was almost twenty years ago and I ate a ‘polenta e gorgonzola’, a dish made from boiled cornmeal cooked with Gorgonzola cheese. I was young and it looked like the Couscous (and Tajine) my grand-mother used to cook, but with cheese only. Traditional polenta is slowly cooked, up to two hours; totally different from the made-in-a-minute microwave oven recipe you can find at the supermarket… Later I discovered what true Parmesan really was with Parmigiano-Reggiano (region of Parma). Taste and texture are far from what we all use to call Parmesan outside of Italy. No…⇒ READ MORE