‘Don’t be a tease. What’s happened?’

‘Well, at first I walked into a Berlin Wall of threats and menaces. I wasn’t able to speak to Rinaldi personally, but I was given to understand that he’s absolutely furious and wants to sue your balls off. He’s not interested in a settlement, he claims. Money’s not an issue, it’s a matter of pride and honour, etcetera. In other words, he wants his day in court and is prepared to pay whatever it costs to have it.’

When the original letter from the legal advisers of Lo Chef’s company arrived, threatening an action for ‘very substantial’ damages on the grounds of personal and professional defamation, Edgardo’s initial reaction had been one of disbelief. He had never intended anyone to take his throwaway comment about Rinaldi’s cooking skills literally. It was merely an illustration of his basic thesis in the article, namely that we now live not in a consumerist but a post-consumerist society. Our actual needs having been satisfied, we no longer consume products but process. Thus film footage-the photographic record of actual persons, places and times-is increasingly little more than crude raw material to be transformed by computerised post-production techniques.

Ugo had quoted Walter Pater’s remark that all art aspires to the condition of music, adding that nowadays all art, including music, aspired to the condition of video games. And in one of those knowing references to the vulgarities of contemporary media culture in which he specialised, he had gone on to point out that no one knew whether Romano Rinaldi, the star of the smash hit TV show Lo Chef Che Canta e Incanta, could actually cook at all. Nor did it matter, he had hastened to add, any more than it had mattered when the President of the United States arrived in Iraq on Thanksgiving Day and was photographed in the troop canteen carrying to table what was actually a raw turkey whose skin had been scorched with a blowtorch. Ugo wasn’t sure how seriously he really took any of this, but of course the whole point was that in the cultura post-post-moderna taking things lightly was of the essence. But apparently Romano Rinaldi saw things differently.