Pisces x 3 ~ Pier Paolo Pasolini

Scooting around YouTube one day I happened upon Farmer in the City from Scott Walker's 1995 album Tilt. I listened.... listened again, and again..... throughout the day and next day. It's weird but addictive, and beautifully rendered by Scott Walker.

Being a curious so-and-so I wanted to know what the song was all about. It wasn't difficult to find out, especially as the song is sub-titled Remembering Pasolini. It is a tribute to Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose name I'd heard, in connection with movies, but without knowing anything about him.

I discovered that he had Sun, Venus and Uranus in Pisces - so, with Sun, Mercury, Moon and Neptune in Pisces as I type, and remembering that Neptune and Pisces connect to film, now would be a good time for a post about him.

Astrodatabank and Wikipedia help with detail:

Wikipedia:

A few of the lyrics (of Farmer in the city) are appropriated from Norman Macafee's English translation of Pier Paolo Pasolini's poem, "Uno dei Tanti Epiloghi" ("One of the Many Epilogs"), which was written in 1969 for Pasolini's friend and protégé, the scruffy young nonprofessional actor, Ninetto Davoli. Throughout the song, Walker's chant of "Do I hear 21, 21, 21...? I'll give you 21, 21, 21...", may be a reference to Davoli's age when he was drafted into (and subsequently deserted from) the Italian army.

Astrodatabank On Pasolini: "Italian actor and director of radical films, best known for controversial films about people in conflict with the mainstream society. A virtual Renaissance man who was "poet, novelist, scholar, film critic and theorist, reforming zealot and creator of large scaled visual spectaculars," he wrote and produced "Boys," and "Sebastian." Poetic and literate, a Marxist yet bourgeois in his efforts to be socially correct, he died under circumstances as perverted as those seen in some of his films. ..............His unorthodox views led to his arrest in 1962 on charges of insulting the church in his film "Rogopag." He clashed frequently with Italian authorities over the content of his films, which held liberal doses of sex, violence and blasphemy, at times being declared obscene...... His own death could have been scripted into one of his features. Pasolini was bludgeoned to death by a 17-year-old youth who claimed that he had made homosexual advances, 11/01/1975, 11:30 PM, Civitavecchia, Italy. The boy then ran him over (several times) with Pasolini's own Alfa Romeo."

With data from Astrodatabank, Pasolini's natal chart:



Astrological indications of Pasolini's non-conformist ways are not hard to find. Eccentric Uranus on the ascendant is a classic sign. In Pasolini's case Uranus conjoins his natal Sun to. Double whammy - in imaginative and potentially addictive Pisces, ruled by Neptune! Mercury, the communcations planet, is in Aquarius - sign of Uranus' rulership, which adds another layer of avant garde non-conformism. This guy was what used to be known as an "enfant terrible"!

Pluto (darkness, death, intensity) in Cancer is in harmonious trine to his ascending degree and those first-house Pisces planets....here's source of the dark side of his eccentricities - and what likely is a reflection of the dreadful manner of his death.

I took a look at the chart for the date of his murder, 1 November 1975 and noted that Pluto then lay at 10 degrees of Libra - exactly conjoining Pasolini's North Node of the Moon, also conjunct Saturn and Jupiter which lay on either side of the node.

It's not too surprising that Scott Walker felt drawn to sing about Pasolini. Walker's chart is shown in the post for Monday 9 January. There's some common emphasis. Both men have Mercury in Aquarius (10 degrees apart), both have Mars in Sagittarius (10 degrees apart). Walker's Moon and midheaven conjoin Pasolini's Uranus/Sun/Venus cluster in Pisces.