*Bilingual English-Italian* "Put your music group together. Paint your own picture. Write your own book, your own poem."

These are original English texts and Italian translations by American Mike Watt, born in 1957. You should already know the author, or at least I hope you do: he is one of those who were there in California to light the fuse under the ass of rock in the late 1970s and the early 1980s. He played bass with the Minutemen, and it was partly because of him and his band that the punk there had taken its certain committed and problematic turn, theirs was a quirky creative vein, quite different from the extreme politicization that used to be gladly flaunted in our parts on stages and covers.

There were three of them (D. Boon guitar, Watt on bass, George Hurley on drums), simple guys who, had they been born in our neighborhood instead of in America, would undoubtedly have been our playmates. They made very short and convoluted pieces, crooked and often ironic, stylistically more akin to the experiments of the Pop Group and Captain Beefheart than to hardcore. The Minutemen's activity came to a halt at the end of 1985, when D. Boon was the victim of a car accident. Watt and Hurley are devastated, taking a while to return to the scene: urged on by friends, they form fIREHOSE and willingly get embroiled in dozens of different projects, nothing and no one has stopped them since.

The book edited by Dethector focuses on three "punk rock works" of recent production, and a collection of poems. Each of Watt's works is very strongly characterized. In "Contemplating the Engine Room" (1997) he painstakingly sifts through his relationship with his father, and examines more generally the mechanisms that govern groups, superimposing the parent's life at sea with his life on the streets, highlighting the entanglements, the complicities and quirks of fate that bind men together, whether they are members of a crew aboard a ship or musicians crammed inside a van headed to the next concert. In "The Assistant's Midway Stop" (2004) Watt tells of a sudden as well as severe illness that struck and nearly killed him, from which he emerged only after treatment and a long convalescence, in a kind of Dante-inspired journey. The tones of the speech change completely, influenced for certain by delirium and fever, by the frantic bouncing of thoughts in the head in the immobile hours on a hospital bed, the drift of medication. In "Man-with-a-treatment" (2010), explicitly inspired by the paintings apocalyptic of Hyeronimus Bosch, are collected thirty pieces in which Watt recounts the way in which "men become men."

Again, the style changes: here it becomes visionary, creeping as serpent-like, the words used as mirror games, as riddles, as prophecies. Almost the second half of the volume is taken up by a collection of poems, not explicitly dated but overall recent, which often reveal the more intimate side of the author. A couple are hymns of boundless love to monuments (John Coltrane, John Entwistle of the Who), many others are instead an opportunity to stop and sit on the side of the road, look around and reflect. Said this way is frankly misspoken: the book, especially in this fourth part, is far more complex and meditative than I could have described to you in these few lines.

The Italian translation sometimes fails to stop holding onto the original text in its arms, so that some investigative effort is needed on the part of the reader. It must be said that Watt has literally flooded Dethector with additions, explanations, comments, anecdotes, curiosities which the editor has for the most part avoided reporting in the notes: to want to shove everything in there would have required as much volume and, I venture, the result would have been less interesting.