Of course I won't withold from you a handful of inferior quality cell phone snaps of questionable sobrierity from our quick stop in Milan last week, this town which I've visited more frequently than any other over the past eighteen years, right under the mean wheels of a full-blown Furniture Fair. It was of course our dear friend Joel Berg, the great art director and my old Engelbrekt homeboy, featured before in this column, who had made us conduct this brief trip, to endow the launch party for his agency Studio Berg, which he has recently moved from Treviso to Milan, opening in new and spatious premises. Joel wouldn't be Joel and his newlywed wife Kajsa not Kajsa if they hadn's seized the opportunity to make something bigger of it all, by showing "objects" by three other mutual friends of ours, no lesser souls than Marc Newson and James Irvine, the designer stars, and Carsten Höller, the great artist.
It all ended up in, once again, some three tens of highly intense hours in the weak heart of the Lombardian design and fashion metropolis. In addition to Joel's cocktail, we squeezed in a pair of gargantuan three course lunches, complete with grappa and limonchello, a visit to the well-meaning Swedish design event "Swedish Love Stories" (of which I say nothing, so that I've said nothing, as a disgusting old Lutheran saying phrases it), Bar Basso and more or less interesting and rewarding conversions with numerous dozens more or less colorful characters from our Swedish design elite, all these events interspersed with generous numbers of foaming glasses of spumante. Still, I abandoned the design elite to its destiny at a quite early hour on this evening, withdrawing instead with my old homeboy Anders Lindholm, the half Italian who is firmly established in Milan since over a quarter century back, to a Libanese tavern down the steet where we sat for several nightly hours in the company of a fivesome of exasperated Arabs, joining forces in relentless efforts to reform the mind of a solitary fascist, this Italian disease, Anders orating indefatigably in Italian, myself prompting in Swedish in the role of something of a pulled-back ideological safety — the climax of our journey. Don't you believe we ultimately succeeded in our task too! Our dear fascist left the tavern at four in the morning, calm and mild, shaking hand with each and every one of us, with the farewell comment that he was, in reality, a communist! I fkn love it! The prize for Achievement of the Day also went to Yours Truly, for having asked a pair of certified street muggers from an Eastern neighboring land to help give us directons on our map where we came strutting in full gold ringed cocktail rig, our friend Tomas Asplund nursing a volumnious Prada suit shopping bag, to complete the image, in a dark and obscure one-way alley down a ruin railroad track, a notoriously dangerous passway, as we later learned. Their homemade jailhouse tattoos gleamed impressively on their palmtops as the fingered my map in confusion, before regaining their composure, asking for the mandatory "cigarro". We were greatful that the old saying that muggers hesitate to mug a mugger once again proved true...
I add a couple of equally poor quality images from our dear old friend Thomas Sandell's opening at Galleri Brännström here in Stockholm a few days before our Milan expedition, where he showed unique glass objects which he has produced over the past two years with Italian glass manufacturer Murano.
— Hey Brother I still don’t understand, man. I’m still high off this shit, man. I’m calling my black woman i bitch. I’m calling my people all kinds of shit that they’re not. I’m lost Brother, can you help me?
Wu Tang Clan