lormare73

Can I ask you the source please?

He is in Miami.

Before the gig I went behind the arena to see where Mika could go out and I saw a part of Mika's family arriving: dad, mum definitely in a wheelchair with a girl who put a blanket on her and this lady, very similar to Joanie, who had a crutch and was limping. But I'm pretty sure that, during the concert, Mika's mum was in a wheelchair and she didn't move at all. To say the truth I was a bit sad because she didn't seem to be well, not at all. 😔

@mellody dId you really see Mika's mum standing up? I looked at her several times and I always saw her quite still in her weelchair between zuleika and fortune'. There was a lady sitting there who looked a lot like her, but I think she was one of her sisters (I think Austin and Audrey' s mum) and it was her who moved in her seat.

Oh, thank you so much! 😊

Does anybody know if it is possible to bring a powerbank inside the venue?

This is the second and last part of the translation of the Wired interview. I hope I haven't made too many mistakes. Q. What relationship do you have with social media and technology in general? A. Ours isn’t a relationship with technology anymore, but with her interfaces, where everything is based on our desire’s exploitation, on surplus, on continuous comparison with others. We end up being envious of everyone. My only antidote is to do something I am creatively satisfied with. Q. What annoys you most about social media? A. Most of my friends use dating apps, where the choice process is based only on images. There’s no humanity, everything is based only on sex, where there isn’t even chemistry but only consumption. They made me read their chat on Tinder and I saw that the more you write, the less the other wants to talk to you. Q. Where have you met your partner? A. I met Andy in a pub. And I also disliked him. Q. Ennio Flaiano (an Italian journalist and writer) used to say: “great loves announce themselves in a precise way: as soon as you see her you say: who is this bi**h / as***le?”… A. When I saw him I thought indeed: “Who is that idiot / stupid (cretino in Italian)?” Anyway, I wrote Dear Jealousy because even my partner and I spent a difficult year and the cause was the jealousy: he makes documentaries, a job that often leads him to get into other people ‘s life very deeply. And that, sometimes, can bring some consequences in the couple. Anyway, we got over it. Q. Coming back to social media: how do you react to negative comments? A. The problem of negativity online is that it’s really exciting. It plays with that bit of sadomasochism that is present inside every person. People complain about it but then put it into practice. For this reason, when on Instagram you read the start of a mean message, you don’t resist temptation and you go on until the end. Luckily I have a lot of humour. Irony saves us, from everything. Q. Beside your mother, who have been your good and bad teachers? A. Some of my teachers have been very important. For better or for worse. One of them has nearly ruined my life and that of other children as well, she would be in jail. Nowadays she tries to get in touch with me all the time, but I never want to talk to her again. Q. What did she do to you? A. Every school year she identified some children and abused them. Not sexually but psychologically. When I was 7, she found lots of ways to humiliate me: sometimes she forced me to stand on the desk for two hours. One day she mortified a girl so much that, for the embarrassment, she wet herself. Not happy, she wrote a story about this episode and she hung it in the classroom, forcing everybody to read it in front of that poor girl. She was sick. Q. Let’s talk about the good teachers? A. Two. One was my French and Spanish teacher. He was fired from a private school, because he has participated to Mister Gay Uk competition, arriving on stage completely stoned. He used to sleep only 3 hours, because he went out to dance every night. He was really out of his mind, but he was also a genius who spoke 14 languages Swahili included. Although it was known he was gay, nobody, neither the most mean schoolmates, dared say anything , because he had a razor-sharp intelligence: in one moment he could humiliate you or lift you up. At school he has been a great support for me. Q. Did he also help you to understand your sexuality? A. He has been a good example even when he was a bad example, because, if he exaggerated, I told myself: I don’t want to end up like this. He was a real person and he allowed us to be the same. With him we staged Peter Shaffer works or Maupassant stories. Everything was possible, as in the film Dead Poets Society (L’attimo fuggente in Italian). Q. And the second good teacher? A. It was my English teacher. With her we created a magazine named Pink, where we wrote crazy and irreverent things: unfortunately one day there was a leak and all our articles ended up on the national press, from Times to Evening Standard. A scandal. We students were threatened with expulsion and her to be fired: we saved ourselves because she took all the blame. They gave her another year, then they would send her away. She decided to leave organizing “a cabaret show made as it should be made”. She asked me to play the part of a presenter / host (presentatore in Italian) “pig, sexist, disguised/drag (travestito in Italian), drug addicted, perverted, filonazi”. And I answered: “Ok, let’s do it.” Q. What did you learn from that experience? A. That was the first time when I realized how much power a performance could have. Pushing me so far, I felt I kept everyone in the palm of my hand. During that show I decided to leave the London School of Economics (to which I had been admitted), to camping outside the Royal College of Music (who had rejected me instead): every evening I waited for the principal of singing course to beg him to let me do another audition. It was all thanks to that show and to that teacher because, when they fired her, she told me: I leave the school but I will have a career. If you leave the school, be sure to have a career too. Q. Your teacher, did she have a career then? A. Today she is one of the five most important theatre directors in the world: her name is Lyndsey Turner. Q. And how did it go to you? Did they let you re-do the audition? A. Yes. The teacher said that I was crazy and he accepted me. And the rest is history.

I'm posting the first part of the wired article's translation. My English is very basic and I helped myself with Google transalte. I hope it will be quite clear. I'll try to post the second part this evening or tomorrow. TO BECOME SOMEBODY ELSE To make his new album, the pop star has made a journey to discover his origins and the person who could have been. Starting with the name: Michael Holbrook. It’s unusual to meet an artist, one with Mika’s sensitiveness and culture, who is willing to tell, with great honesty, about a moment of big change. Who is willing to talk for real, even if he starts with: “what shall we say? I already said everything in the press release”. He jokes, but not so much either. It doesn’t happen every day that the new album presentation of an international artist uses words like: “ I went in search of who I could have been if I weren’t Mika. Some artists engage in an artistic alter ego. I made the opposite, I went to discover the man behind the artist”. And if someone had still doubts about the facts that he really wants to tell who he is, the title of his new work takes them away: My name is Michael Holbrook. Q. To entitle the album with your real name is a sort of coming out to reveal who you really are? A. I was born Michael Holbrook, but half an hour after my birth, my mother had chosen Mica. It’s her who imposed it to me: she didn’t want a son with a name w.a.s.p. She used to say that it was ugly and boring, “a name who smelled of Usa”. She said exactly these words. So, if we didn’t consider those first 30 minutes, I have always been Mica. I only changed the c with the k, graphically it was better. Q. So what do you want to say with My name is Michael Holbrook? A. The last record is from 2015, then I wrote nothing for 2 years because I had nothing to say. During that period I was in Florida and one day, thinking about my life, I realized that I had always worked only with my mother. Since I was a child, she had taken control of me: “you will end in jail or you will be famous” she used to repeat. The only reason why I started this job is that I was terrified to go to jail. I had no choice. Q. Tell me about that day in Florida A. I decided to discover the other side of my family, my father’s one, the Penniman: I drove to Savannah, Georgia. I didn’t know anything about them, only that they were W.A.S.P. I went to Bonaventure cemetery where I found their large fenced lot: the males were all called Richard, William, Michael or Holbrook. I looked at their graves and I told myself: “This is me, this story is part of me and, if I have to look for something to write, it’s from here that I will start”. My album was born in that cemetery. When I came back home I sat in front of my piano and I wrote “My name is Michael Holbrook, I was born in 1983”. It was the start. Q. What happened afterwards? A. I discovered the perverse joy of writing from Michael Holbrook point of view. Mika made television, read the reviews, was asked by fans not to film videos with good looking girls, pretending to be a heterosexual male… I wanted to tell everybody to go to hell! And what better way to do that? Becoming someone else. Someone who is really the real me and has my birth name. With this feeling I finally felt free and I started to write. I promised myself to do that only at home: in Florida, in London and finally in a rented house in Tuscany. In this home-like environment I found myself like I still was “Mica with the c”, writing without thinking too much at the consequences, with a joy that allowed me to face lightly very difficult topics, that I had never had the courage to write about. Q. For example? A. My sister Paloma’s terrible accident. One night she fall from a 4th floor window and she was pierced by the railing. I was with her, waiting for aid. Doctors said she would die: she is alive. That she would be paralyzed and on a wheelchair: today she walks. That she would never have children: she has a son. When you write a pop album and you put in it a song about that night, you realize that something inside you unblocked: you can call it emancipation, liberation or revelation. My tour name will be Revelation indeed. Q. with this album do you want to cut the umbilical cord? A. We choose nothing, it’s life that make it in our place. We can only react to what life throws at us making some actions, like writing a new album. In this way we are under the illusion of having control. Q. What is that life threw at you? A. When I started to work at this album many things happened: my mother’s health got worse, five persons very important for me passed away, I rebuilt the relationship with my sister Paloma… I understood that our dear ones won’t be with us forever, even if we often are under the illusion of the contrary. Only knowing who you are, emotionally and creatively, you can accept all of this: you have to leave space to the sweetest version of yourself, where love is at the center of everything, without shame or disguise. To survive you have to be flexible like trees in the wind. If you are hard, you will end to break yourself. Q. This is an album where you get naked (metaphorically speaking). Listening to Dear Jealousy it seems you have problems with jealousy… A. Yes, it’s a disease. Everyone has problems with jealousy and envy, just have an Instagram account, a social who is based on these feelings.

If nobody does it, I will try to translate it in the next days.

It seems to me that nobody has posted this very interesting interview to the magazine Wired. I have only the screenshots, I don't think it's available online. My english, unfortunately, is not good enough to be able to translate it.

Thanks Deb! I sent my money. See you all in few weeks!

He said in a radio interview (I think radio 2 in italy but I'm not sure) that he had to go to new York to attend an event, but I didn't understand what type of event.

It was my question but he didn't reply to it because the woman read 5 or 6 questions very quickly, and maybe he replied only to the last one.

I think the interview was made in may 2019 because the journalist says that the five years old nephew brought him a cake from his recent birthday. And Beauregard was born in May.

It wasn't her who wrote about the duet but some fans. He said: "they want us to make a duet." He was surprised and genuinely happy that she was watching.

I don't know if in this interview or in another one he said that the stage will be "reaching out" (I don't know the exact word, in Italian It's "proteso ") towards the public and there will be something hanging from the ceiling that illustrate his Life.

Yes, you do. Mika replies: ahh, maybe, I don't want to say anything

Ohhhh, his mum has a brain tumor 😥

I saw a video on Instagram and it seems to me that he climbed over it.

Forthcoming means "Next, that is ready to come out". It's not fourth coming.

In the Instagram live he called him his musical director, therefore I think he will be present in the whole tour 😉

He talks about Michael holbrook and he says that it's a mix between a sort of alterego (his version of Ziggy Stardust) and his real name, his real person. Starting with who he is now to understand who he wants to become in the future.

Spending his holidays in Greece quite often and with a partner who is half Greek, I think he knows at least the more common words.

I understood "Yassas" that means a formal Hello in Greek

I remember the same thing: it was "Blue"