Keith Flint, vocalist with the Prodigy, has died at the age of 49. He was found at his home in Essex on Monday.

The Prodigy released a statement confirming the news, saying: “It is with deepest shock and sadness that we can confirm the death of our brother and best friend Keith Flint. A true pioneer, innovator and legend. He will be forever missed. We thank you for respecting the privacy of all concerned at this time.”

Liam Howlett, who formed the group in 1990, wrote on Instagram: “I can’t believe I’m saying this but our brother Keith took his own life over the weekend. I’m shell shocked, fuckin angry, confused and heart broken ..... r.i.p brother Liam”.

An Essex police spokesman confirmed that a 49-year-old man had died. “We were called to concerns for the welfare of a man at an address in Brook Hill, North End, just after 8.10am on Monday,” he said.

“We attended and, sadly, a 49-year-old man was pronounced dead at the scene. His next of kin have been informed. The death is not being treated as suspicious and a file will be prepared for the coroner.”

With his punk aesthetic of piercings, spiked hair and intense stare, Flint became one of the UK’s most iconic musical figures in the 1990s. He joined the Prodigy as a dancer, later becoming a frontman alongside rapper Maxim. Aside from their 1992 debut, all of the group’s seven albums have reached No 1 in the UK, the most recent being No Tourists, released in November 2018.

Flint performed the vocals on the Prodigy’s best known singles, Firestarter and Breathe, which both went to No 1 in 1996. Firestarter became their biggest US hit and the group are often credited with helping to break dance music into the mainstream in the country.

Firestarter’s black and white video, featuring a headbanging, gurning Flint, was banned by the BBC after it was screened on Top of the Pops, with parents complaining that it frightened children. The self-lacerating lyrics - “I’m the bitch you hated/filth infatuated” - were the first Flint had written for the band. “The lyrics were about being onstage: this is what I am. Some of it is a bit deeper than it seems,” Flint told Q magazine in 2008. The track sold more than 600,000 copies in the UK.

Speaking to the Guardian in 2015, Flint lamented the state of modern pop music. “We were dangerous and exciting! But now no one’s there who wants to be dangerous. And that’s why people are getting force-fed commercial, generic records that are just safe, safe, safe.”

His success was hard won. Having grown up with dyslexia, he dropped out of school aged 15 and worked as a roofer in Essex before joining the Prodigy. He later weathered an addiction to prescription painkillers but became sober and married Japanese DJ Mayumi Kai in 2006. The couple later separated.

As well as his success with the Prodigy, Flint founded the successful motorcycle racing outfit Team Traction Control, which made its debut in 2014 and went on to win multiple Supersport TT titles.

The Prodigy played some of the biggest stages in the UK, including the 1996 Knebworth concerts headlined by Oasis and, in 1997 became the first dance group to headline Glastonbury. Festival organiser Emily Eavis paid tribute, calling their set “a huge, unforgettable moment”.

Eavis added: “He’s played here so many times with the Prodigy and was booked for 2019. What an incredible frontman.”

Gail Porter, who dated Flint between 1999 and 2000, simply wrote the word “heartbroken” on Twitter.

Further tributes have been made from his musical peers. Ed Simons of the dance duo the Chemical Brothers shared a memory of Flint on Instagram.

A post from the Chemical Brothers’ official Twitter account said Flint “was an amazing front man, a true original and he will be missed”.

Richard Russell, the head of the XL Recordings label that first signed the group, said on Twitter: “Devastated keith flint is gone. not just a great performer. he had total integrity & an incredible sense of humour. one of the sweetest people I’ve ever worked with. what a beautiful energy. what a gentleman. privileged to have known him. miss u keith.”

Sleaford Mods, whose frontman Jason Williamson collaborated with the Prodigy on the 2015 track Ibiza, tweeted: “Very sorry to hear of the passing of Keith Flint. Good night mate. Take it easy.” Another collaborator, the band Kasabian, described him as a “beautiful man” and “incredible pioneer”.

The rapper Professor Green said the Prodigy at the Brixton Academy in 2009 was “the best gig I’d ever seen, and still is till this day” and had inspired him to be a music star. He added: “Your music, your presence, your attitude. It all had such an influence on me. Saddened doesn’t even cut it.”

✓ 1st Book (in the correction phase, but here we are)
✓ 2nd Degree (in Humanities, the first was Technical)
✓ 1st scientific article (a peer-reviewed one)
✓ 1st Course in Tor Vergata University.
× Definitive breach with my ex girlfriend.

An intense year. No doubt.

In search of a pattern

"There are things that don't look connected, but at some point you can connect them and everything makes sense", says Cheryl in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (the remake is not a great movie but contains several good insights).

Sometimes I put together some elements to find a pattern, a model of meaning. Steve Jobs focused his famous Stanford speech of 2005 on the concept of connecting dots, adding that to achieve it you can only look back. It's like that, and sometimes I can do it well, sometimes less. On many occasions, this year, I have been able to connect the dots and see a bigger picture, and it was perhaps the year in which it happened more clearly.

Not for everyone is this way, or not for all things (the theme of personal and collective narration is a leitmotif of my research - so somewhere here the longread is assured). If I look at the stories of friends, ex's, or colleagues, I realize that for some of them, it's not easy to connect dots and see a "design". In some cases, they do not give importance to things that, instead, make sense to connect. In other cases we are fixed in a narration that apparently makes sense, but which is not connecting the "right" things. We often do not give space to what is painful, because we don't want to see it in our life, and consciousness. So we tell us a story, but the dots do not connect, or something is always missing... and the painting simply doesn't appear.

The last check on my list is in this category: it was a loss I do not understand well. I can cling to a poet motto, or tell me that it helped growing (in some circumstances, it was), but the truth is that after all these years I'm still unable to catch sense of this story - maybe our singer Vasco is right: there is no one. No dots to join, no pattern.

The personal point of view

In connecting things, there is a personal focal and an extended one.

In the personal focal I can say that a recognizable pattern was certainly the field of study, on the topics that were of my greatest interest: research on digital processes and teaching. The possibility offered by the degree in humanities, combined with the one in computer engineering, gave me the basis to configure a path of deepen professional growth in these two areas. I saw how everything I had done was necessary. Clearly, in order to achieve these results, it was necessary to work hard, but there is a common thread that links the past things - even apparently wrong (such as the degree in engineering, in fact) - to what I have done nowaday. Those skills and past "wrong" studies now make sense.

That's why when I see friends avoiding connecting experiences, I get to say "believe me, it's not useless". Yet I already know that they will not believe me. I too, often, struggle to recognize the experiences, especially the painful and senseless ones. It is way a continuous work, which we never stop learning to do - with a method. Often we find ourselves failing to reread our personal history from different perspectives, and - specially - with a different look...

The tiring adjective refers to all the things that have happened in a single calendar year, so many. Beautiful (most), but also exhausting, because I had to review almost all of my work and study models. It seems not so, but it's like changing head or almost, after 45... Someone could call it "a beautiful challenge" (a term that immediately makes you think of the marketing language). Complicated challenges, too. At the end of the year I experienced two events that are difficult to manage (and we are the third adjective, difficult), I prefer not to talk a lot about. From the seemingly simple distortion to the wrist - that instead is perhaps something other -, to important people who moved away from my routine for work and obedience's reasons. And I will miss them...

Here comes the... Newsletter

Since I'm not the kind of person who stands still for a long time - nor I do everything right, but the contrary*, in January will start my newsletter, which in a flicker of imagination I called "LGPost". It'll be weekly and based on the Paper.li platform drawings from the social feeds I read (Twitter, plus Facebook, Linkedin, in the future), and some articles that I report directly. Hence, if you want to sign up, I'm glad!

* At the time of Splinder - an italian blog community - I wrote a little "eulogy of balance"; today, unfortunately in the maximalism era, articles against mediocrity are rampaging on Medium. Maybe I should find that post...

This morning I woke up early because of the delivery of my new pc, scheduled by courier between 8.00am and 14.00pm.

This is the 2nd time this pc is delivered to me, since the first time, at the end of April,  was severely bent in the middle, and the computer was returned to the store to be changed. The merchant ByTecno, thought, was really correct and immediately proceeded to change it on my report basis.

Now the baby is in the house! I've to install some good software...

It's a HP Envy 15, with a Full HD screen of 15,6" - I choose this machine because of the double initiative of HP:
1) taking back of a pc with i5 processor, valued 140 €, and
2) the return of 15% on the price of a HP laptop purchased.

This combination, and the fact that I've found it at a best price of 800 € instead of 1000 on the Internet, means that the total savings will be almost 50%!

Follows the specification of the machine (mine it's a J104SL but has same specs):

I've read with the deepest sadness about the cold death of Philip Seymour Hoffman, that I loved in his severe actorship's ability to render the suffering of men throughout different movies. Here's a memory article that I found really special and toughtful about the actor, from the Esquire magazine by the editor Tom Junod.

Just a note. One of the best films I've ever seen is Before the devil knows you're dead, (2007), where the filmmaker, the amazing Sidney Lumet, has directed his last film (and last for Hoffman too): the exceptional character of the protagonist (the other one is Ethan Hawke) makes this movie really special, and through the story and the perception it leaves.

I had two contradictory but complementary responses to the news that Philip Seymour Hoffman had died of a drug overdose at the suddenly tender age of 46 -- two responses, that is, beyond how terrible and damn, he was great.

The first was that there was no way Hoffman had died with a syringe still in his arm -- no way that an actor who brought such finicky dignity to his portrayal of the most desperate characters had permitted himself to die so ruthlessly unmasked.

The second was that of course he had died in such a sordid manner -- how else was Philip Seymour Hoffman supposed to die? There was no actor, in our time, who more ably suggested that each of us is the sum of our secrets...no actor who better let us know what he knew, which is that when each of us returns alone to our room, all bets are off. He used his approachability to play people who are unacceptable, especially to themselves; indeed, his whole career might be construed as a pre-emptive plea for forgiveness to those with the unfortunate job of cleaning up what he -- and we -- might leave behind. The only way that Philip Seymour Hoffman could have died in a manner more consistent with the characters he created would have been if he had died by auto-erotic asphyxiation.

And in the extermity of these two responses was, I think, the essence of Hoffman's art.

He often played creeps, but he rarely played them creepily. His metier was human loneliness -- the terrible uncinematic kind that has very little to do with high-noon heroism and everything to do with everyday empathy -- and the necessary curse of human self-knowledge. He held up a mirror to those who could barely stand to look at themselves and invited us not only to take a peek but to see someone we recognized. He played frauds who knew they were frauds, schemers who knew they were schemers, closeted men who could only groan with frustrated love, heavy breathers dignified by impeccable manners, and angels who could withstand the worst that life could hand out because they seemed to know the worst was just the beginning. And what united all his roles was the stoic calm he brought to them, the stately concentration that assured us that no matter whom Philip Seymour Hoffman played, Philip Seymour Hoffman himself was protected.

That's what I thought, anyway -- in reading the early reports of his death, I was surprised that he'd battled the demon of addiction, because I'd always confused Hoffman's mastery with detachment, and assumed that he had lived by Flaubert's charge to live an orderly life so that he could be violent and original in his work. But I shouldn't have been surprised, and -- here's that contradictory and complementary response again -- I wasn't. I'd never met Philip Seymour Hoffman, never knew anyone who knew him, never even read a passably revealing magazine profile of him. All I really knew was that he was a character actor who came as close to being a movie star as character actors ever get, and that he played the lead in more Hollywood movies than any other portly, freckly, gingery man in human history. And that, in its way, is all I, or anyone else, needs to know.

We live in the golden age of character actors -- in an age when actors who have done their time in character roles are frequently asked to carry dark movies and complicated television dramas. The line between character actors and movie stars is being erased -- in art, anyway, if not in life. In life, it's different, because the "movie star" remains not just the product of looks and charm, but also a kind of social construct, with very distinct social obligations. Character actors like Philip Seymour Hoffman and James Gandolfini have found themselves getting more and more leading roles because they are permitted to behave onscreen in ways that George Clooney and Matt Damon never could. But the same permission extends offscreen, and that's where we see the cost; indeed, we pay to look at men who look like us only when they convince us that that they live in psychic spaces that we could never endure...unless, of course, we happen to be enduring them.

Would Matt Damon ever be found dead, with a syringe still hanging from his arm? Would George Clooney essentially eat himself to death? No, for the simple fact they both have way too much to lose. But neither would they permit themselves to be weepily jerked off by Amy Adams, as Philip Seymour Hoffman was, in The Master, or to crawl as far into his own dead eyes as James Gandolfini regularly did in The Sopranos. The great character actors are now the actors whose work has the element of ritual sacrifice once claimed by the DeNiros of the world, as well as the element of danger-- the actors who thrill us by going for broke. It should be no surprise when, occasionally, they break, or turn out to be broken. RIP.

Due to the category in which put me Falso Idillio ("weaver"), I've to insert a post of a sort of balance, so I put my complete adhesion to the public homily of Benedict XVI. Also for the Family Day organized by italian syndacilist Savino Pezzotta, I've thoughts of appreciation. If I could, I would have gone too to the Family Day in Rome. The founding, useful, more important faith in the family like society nucleus, of every religious or civil ordering that is, a brick of the irrenounceable human society at in these years "under attack" from economics, politic, social institutions and individuals that don't see importance amid included ones.

Many other things, in fact, can be added to the debate on Ratzinger. In social networks as in blogs it depopulates to speak badly of and therefore takes me to deepen another argument, a lot in order to understand wether that the so-called blogosphere drowns in worrisome informative and cultural superficialisms or not, it's simply is baldy thinking.

Therefore, leaving from a link to a Family alternativ Day, I have uncovered blog, in which it is spoken about an indictment of Ratzinger in the USA. From it starts a moment where - on Internet - by now you can find a version that Ratzinger "covered the pedofiles priests", and was elected to save himself. I find it highly improbable, to not say impossiblee but Pandemia resumed a BBC video that turns on the Internet sometimes. That does not turn out me Ratzinger has never covered these sick priests, if in order not to defend an institution from a plague that is assaulting it more and more, and they give within. The priests are men, and like all therefore they are inclined to mistake itself. However, nobody has never said that they are divine. But: people believes that they must be perfect, without spot neither sin, because they are priests, therefore is presumed also saint, and that the every serious, indeed most serious lack also, must be endured shown the entire world, they must be every cutted off any assignment, judged, condemned without appeal, and finally eliminates to you, also even offcommunicated so that we can remain in topic.
But, keep calm: who said it? Dan Brown?
It seems a bit strange to trust it: no structure, society, family, or atmosphere of whichever level have not been looked at, in which the lack of a member it is endured, immediately, with seam of rumbles of blast of bugles, capacity to the public opinion, and from this same one put the sentence, condemned without appeal, even from one hungry society of monster, and finally eliminated. It is not expected goodness knows from the civil society but because it is expected from the Church.
We go ourselves repeat, much plan: the recent developments of the case of Rignano Flaminio, on which the blogger Leonardo just writes ,they perhaps are there to demonstrate that at the end, it is better to inquire before, that to throw persons with problems without try to resolve the problem, and that's can be very uncorrect. And if it is expected from the civil society, it is also expected from the Church. Sure, in the moment in which from the simple suspicion you can rely on a substantial certainty, the same conclusions that carry the civil justice to undertake hard actions also they must induce the Church to make equally, obviously with the due confidentiality and in the respective differences. But as all known, this has its times, generally not much short..

Finally, on purpose of the video, and on purpose above all of the cited document, the Crimen sollicitationis that memory to be of 1962, and deployed by Giovanni XXIII, I think opportune to bring back - with to a corollary of explanation of the eccelsiastic Rights from this post of Angelo Bottone:

On the homepage of the journal Republica, today, an article appears that references to a documentary of the BBC on the saddest vicissitudes of sexual abuses perpetuated from some priests Irish homosexuals in Ireland and the USA.
The documentary had provoked wide protests when it was transmitted in full TV perche' of sensazionalistiche affirmations and references not documented.

In the article of Republic a document ' segreto' ( in real is made reference to the Crimen Sollicitationis for null secret inasmuch as it was published on the Acta Apostolicae Sedis) of 1962 and asserts, falsely, that ' guarantor of the application of those directives he was Benedict XVI, to the age of the facts still cardinal Joseph Ratzinger'. False affirmation two times is because in 1962 was not part of the Sant' Uffizio but simply one of the greater teologi catholic progressives, neither was a cardinal (was made bishop 15 years after).
About the document in issue of it John Allen spoke correctly, my preferred vaticanist, in 2003 here.

Why Republic has resumed just hour this old issue seems to me obvious: to throw I discredit in the comparisons of the ecclesiale institution.

Living in Ireland, I have been able to follow the sad and tragic vicissitude. This kind of crimes does not deserve no justification, neither it can diminish itself. Some bishops in the past have silenced or covered the behavior of some of their priests and the Irish Church he is still paying and suffering for these errors.
Said this, false arguments aren't convenient to nobody and the article of Republic contains falsities.
To who it interests the truth, can begin to document itself and to follow the suggested connections here and here.

update Thanks to the "El testamento del pescador", the documentation page of the BBC video has been translated in espanol too: here the link.

Sometimes things seem to decide to go worst all together. There must be a logical meaning in this correlation that it's escapeing. But I'm not sure, afterwards, that there's a logical explanations at all.

(remember that "It's that feeling you have had all your life. That feeling that something was wrong with the world. You don't know what it is but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.")

It seems it'll be a fantastic Christmas. And some changes in the short period too (uhm). In the long period, oh well, you now what that famous economist being said..

If I'm able to avoid a terrible New Year's Day Party, it's done!

Better: I disappear for a while, we'll see in the near future (if God wants)

(images from "my dream new year's day": bears playing; letargo)

Here in Rome there's a hot weather...but the wind is present and temperature is fine. In other words, even if I must remain in the city, i don't see the terrible need to go elsewhere. Fortunately, this summer is so.

But this is the first summer i pass with my mother lonely after my father gone, so I'm a bit sad (also w/out 'a bit')

In the last part of August, we will go to S.Giovanni Rotondo (the city of Padre Pio) where we've home. I will remain there until 2 september, when my cousin, Laura, marries.

The last time i was here, it was with my father. All the times i was here, there was him. This was the place he impianted the pacemaker, this was the place where he said me he was hearth-illed, in the 1967 here he knew my mother. All this memory is there. And all this will make this journey not so good, not at all.