Gazza Quotes

All I want to shout is 'Moaty, it's Gazza!', and I guarantee me and him could sit and chat. I would say, 'Why don't you just put the gun away, throw it in the river? The police are not going to kill you.

Another moment until the spaghetti is done; there I am, whistling the prelude to Rossini’s La Gazza Ladra along with the FM radio. Perfect spaghetti-cooking music. I

The only mistakes we truly make are those we do not learn from.

If in doubt, write it out!

Gustav is a composer. For months he has been carrying on a raging debate with Säure over who is better, Beethoven or Rossini. Säure is for Rossini. “I’m not so much for Beethoven qua Beethoven,” Gustav argues, “but as he represents the German dialectic, the incorporation of more and more notes into the scale, culminating with dodecaphonic democracy, where all notes get an equal hearing. Beethoven was one of the architects of musical freedom—he submitted to the demands of history, despite his deafness. While Rossini was retiring at the age of 36, womanizing and getting fat, Beethoven was living a life filled with tragedy and grandeur.” “So?” is Säure’s customary answer to that one. “Which would you rather do? The point is,” cutting off Gustav’s usually indignant scream, “a person feels good listening to Rossini. All you feel like listening to Beethoven is going out and invading Poland. Ode to Joy indeed. The man didn’t even have a sense of humor. I tell you,” shaking his skinny old fist, “there is more of the Sublime in the snare-drum part to La Gazza Ladra than in the whole Ninth Symphony. With Rossini, the whole point is that lovers always get together, isolation is overcome, and like it or not that is the one great centripetal movement of the World. Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs. All the shit is transmuted to gold. The walls are breached, the balconies are scaled—listen!” It was a night in early May, and the final bombardment of Berlin was in progress. Säure had to shout his head off. “The Italian girl is in Algiers, the Barber’s in the crockery, the magpie’s stealing everything in sight! The World is rushing together.

The military band did not make things easier. Having detected a larger than usual turnout of British travelers, and waiting with some infernal clairvoyance until Cyprian thought he had a grip on himself, just as he turned to bid Yashmeen a breezy arrivederci, they began to play an arrangement for brass of ‘Nimrod’ – what else? – from Elgar’s Enigma Variations. Teutonic bluntness notwithstanding, at the first major-seventh chord, an uncertainty of pitch among the trumpets contributing its touch of unsought innocence, Cyprian felt the tap opening decisively. It was difficult to tell what Yashmeen was thinking as she offered her lips. He was concentrating on not getting her vestee wet. The music took them for an instant in its autumnal envelope, shutting out the tourist chatter, the steam horns and quayside traffic, in as honest an expression of friendship and farewell as the Victorian heart had ever managed to come up with, until finally, the band moved mercifully on to ‘La Gazza Ladra.’ It wasn’t till Yashmeen nodded and released him that Cyprian realized they had been holding each other.

But if there was a Heaven, there was a Hell, and from the depths of Hell came Alberto Gazza and his fucking lips. Tempting him, corrupting him, guiding him to the place he was always predestined to call home: the deepest darkness, the only source of light being the fire Alberto lit in his groin.

Theft seems to be a persistent personality trait. Rossini was inspired to write an opera in the early 1800s called La Gazza Ladra—The Thieving Magpie—and people who have an unusual preoccupation with shiny objects are said to have “magpie syndrome.” This thieving reputation may be part folktale, but the birds do occasionally swipe things, often for no obvious purpose. When a magpie was caught stealing a customer’s car keys at a garage in Littleborough, England, it made the Manchester Evening News, and also in Britain, The Telegraph reported in 2008 that a magpie had snatched a woman’s $5,000 platinum engagement ring from her windowsill while she was in the shower—luckily, her husband-to-be found it tucked safely in the bird’s nest in a nearby oak tree, albeit three years later! One of the most intriguing behaviors of wild magpies involves their apparent habit of holding impromptu funerals. Sometimes, when a magpie finds a dead comrade, it will begin squawking at full volume, calling in all other magpies in the area, which join in an intense racket as they gather around the body. At some point, they all go quiet; there follows a period of contemplation, during which time different individuals will sometimes gently probe or preen the carcass, before each bird silently takes its leave, one by one.

(in those days, before Gazza, before cynical and meaningless pre-season tournaments which somehow still offer a methadone alternative to the real competitions to come, before the ludicrous freneticism of the contemporary transfer market, the newspapers went weeks on end without even mentioning football)

I wish that, the way secret manuscripts ought to, the thing arrived on our laps bound in Moroccan leather, dusty and smelling of Muscilin and old fly-tying capes. That it was penned in permanent ink, calligraphied almost, in a neat and precise hand, filled with hand-drawn maps dotted with X spots and question marks, and with watercolour sketches instead of snapshots. Alas, no, it came in a much more contemporary and prosaic fashion, by email and as a spreadsheet file. Nevertheless, it had Gazza and me drooling with anticipation, because what it contained was priceless, so never mind the banal form and packaging.

prelude to Rossini’s La Gazza Ladra along with the FM radio. Perfect spaghetti-cooking music.