Opinion – Cozinha Bruta: The world without Angeli and without pizza in California

The day dawned melancholy with the news of the giant Angeli’s retirement. The 65-year-old cartoonist, father of the characters Bob Cuspe and Rê Bordosa, ended his career after being diagnosed with aphasia – a degenerative disorder that affects communication skills and language comprehension.

I’m a blasé guy, I refuse to play anyone’s fan, but Angeli is my idol. It was precisely by spending my adolescence immersed in the collection of Chiclete com Banana magazine that I developed some critical sense and became this cynical being. It has a good side, believe me.

“Ah… here comes one more talk about himself.” Exactly.

Most of what we write is about ourselves, with commendable exceptions for the chemistry test and the report on the traffic jam on the way out for the holiday.

And Angeli, with all due respect to his family and to Arnaldo himself, transcends the human figure of the designer. The man is still alive, thankfully. But we need to deal with the fact that the world, from now on, will no longer be publicly scrutinized through Angeli’s genius lens – someone commented on my social media that one word is an anagram of the other.

Angeli’s retirement is another punch in the kidneys for my generation, the children of the 1960s and 70s. An unmistakable sign that our time is about to end, it’s time to make room for others. That’s how it is, it always has been, it always will be and it should be that way, but who said it doesn’t hurt?

And the California pizza, what the hell does it have to do with all this?

I’ve always heard that this pizza flavor was a favorite of Angeli’s – who I don’t know personally, but is friends with many friends. It may or may not be, but it is a fact that California pizza has been immortalized in its trait. See the comic by the male man Bibelô that illustrates this text.

I bet many here don’t even know what a California pizza is.

He was never successful (unlike Angeli), he was always marginal (like him). It’s a smoked meat pizza (it can be tenderloin, turkey or ham) with fruit in syrup: pineapple, peach, fig, whatever.

Almost no one ordered this sweet-salty Christmas dinner in flat, round dough, but it was present in almost every pizzeria in São Paulo. This was at a time when there was no Neapolitan DOC pizza, burrata or spicy honey from native stingless bees – the entire polarization of the pizza oscillated between thick crust and thin crust.

California pizza is just another thing from a time gone by. It passed to Angeli, to me, to our generations, to São Paulo, to everyone and everything. That’s how it is and should be, but I’m not obligated to like it, just as I’ve never liked California pizza.

Speaking of thank you… thank you so much, Angeli!

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