Flesh for Fantasy

I’m used to seeing recyclers sort through all manner of rubbish. Standing behind a Milanese refuse truck hauling large quantities of discarded meat products is a completely different story. Via Padova, sometime in February.

Declining Exchange Rate

One of the best places to gauge Italy’s changing demographics are the open air markets held throughout Milan each week. Our neighborhood affair takes place on Tuesday and Saturday. Hosted in a square bordering Via Vitruvio, its a great place to buy everything from olive oil and parakeets, to Italian translations of the Koran, and cheap pantyhose.

For the last month, I’ve forced myself to go down to the market, and record the different languages I encounter as I walk from one end to the other.  French, Arabic, Spanish, Tamil, together with several different Italian dialects, are the primary languages spoken. Often I have found myself recording one language on my left, another on my right, simultaneously.

Focused on making audio recordings, I almost always left my camera behind on these trips. Last week, however, I made an exception. An Egyptian merchant had been selling Obama-themed grocery bags for the previous couple of weeks. I didn’t want to buy one. However, I didn’t want to leave Milan without having taken a picture of one of them either.

Inoculated City

I couldn’t think of a better expression of Italy’s anxiety about its increasingly multicultural character than this bus advert for designer jeans. Shot in front of our apartment building in Milan last week, it’s also featured as the main photo on Zeek’s landing page today. I wanted an image that would speak to Wednesday’s feature, Mya Guarnieri’s  We’re Not White Trash. We’re Jews.

The same logic applies to this picture, which we ran on Monday. Published in conjunction with Bruce Wilson’s Their Religion is Hatred, I was hoping the photo would help capture, however indirectly, the stress felt by Arab migrants, like this woman, standing in front of Lega Nord campaign posters, already condemned by an elections campaign monitor. (See “Manifesto Abusivo.”)

Though this photo has already expired (replaced today by the bus advert photo), its caption read “War in the ghetto,” since the shot was taken on Via Padova, the symbolic heart of Milan’s immigrant community. The bus picture, similarly, bears the caption “Dreaming of Multiculturalism,” as a means of explaining what it reflects, rather than what it intends to express. Everything is documentary.

Clampdown

On Friday night, Jennifer and I went out for dinner. Our destination was an Arab-run Tex Mex place on the other side of Piazzale Loreto, a block from the Egyptian consulate. In the year that we’ve been living here, it has definitely become one of our favorite restaurants, even though its not exactly orthodox in its take on the cuisine. Nevertheless, its offered us welcome relief from pasta.

On our walk to the restaurant, we noticed a significant amount of police and military vehicles in the square. Large Carabinieri-marked vans with anti-riot mesh attached to the windows, and oversized, camouflage troop transports repeatedly whizzed by us. Their destination: Via Padova, the site of fierce street battles between Latinos and North Africans two weeks before.

Unnerved by all the activity, following dinner, we took a shortcut home through the Loreto tube station, which you can walk from one side of the square to the other. Its normally bustling passages were empty. Gone were the usual south Asian street vendors hawking keffiyehs and Obama-branded beanies. A trail of blood extended down the floor, stopping, suddenly, fifty or so feet later.

A couple of hours later, I took Pixel out for his last walk. Security personnel continued to drive around the square, periodically turning off onto Via Padova, sometimes onto Corso Buenos Aires, where an ambulance stood parked, lights flashing. From what I could see, the police vans were full. It was difficult to see  through the plastic windows of the army vehicles.

The Carabinieri van, above, was positioned at the entrance to Via Padova.

Focus Group

This was a nice surprise to wake up to today. I’m equally thrilled to be sandwiched between both books. Listing courtesy of Bookforum.

So Twentieth Century

Rome’s old Jewish ghetto is full of arresting political and religious posters and flyers.

World War II is everywhere, or so it seems. Famagosta tube station, Milan, mid-February.

Out For Lunch

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you will have noticed that a number of posts disappeared over the last few days. We’re having some kind of crisis with the database. The assumption is that it occurred as a result of changing hosts last week, from our longtime provider to a newer and better service. Hopefully we’ll be able to recover what’s been lost, and get everything back on track soon.

I’m surprised that after two years of intense use, this blog had not suffered from any hiccups. Here’s to WordPress, and our amazing webdev, Mike Lee, who takes care of Jennifer’s website as well. It’s probably for the best that I take a little downtime anyway, even if its just for a few days. There’s an unbelievable amount of stuff going on right now. The last place I should be is online.

In the interim, check out this amazing mural, which I encountered painted on the wall of a squat in Navigli, not long after McDonalds announced its new ‘Italian’ recipe, the McItaly burger. Apparently it’s a big hit, with over a hundred thousand sold each day. The Guardian’s Matthew Fort disagreed, and had a particularly good time dissing the dish last month. I’d wager he’d appreciate this satire, too.

Wild in the Streets

For the last fortnight, I’ve run into this truck on my morning dog walks. Pixel and Raster always stare up at the collection of  animals quietly, looking a little perplexed.  The driver, a fifty something Arab-looking guy, smiles.

Yesterday, Pixel broke form, and barked repeatedly at the big white tiger. I was unsure as to whether it was because he was the closest to the sidewalk, or because it looked familiar, but didn’t smell particularly alive.

Theory of Labor

If it were up to me, I’d write in the morning, edit in the afternoon, and make music after dinner. In reality, I’m lucky if I get to do anything besides edit. Still in the throes of recovering from a simultaneous magazine and book launch last October, (followed by a US book tour in November), I’m anxious to get creative again.

Since I returned to Milan, I’ve been consumed with editing Zeek, and troubleshooting the inevitable problems one encounters with a brand new site. Starting out each morning writing short posts for the magazine’s Facebook group and Tweeting related copy, I publish an article each weekday, while Jo Ellen handles the columnists.

It’s a decidedly different experience than when I worked as the editor at Allvoices, writing and editing between five and six pieces a day. But, once I found the stories that needed covering, I had no problem losing myself in my flow of responsibilities. Today, I can expend just as much time doing half that, without blinking an eye.

I have three partially completed book outlines to finish, which I began last year, that I plan on returning to. I’ve also started working on several audio projects, including a set of remixes of American belly dance recordings from the 1950s, together with an essay about the records I’m using, that I am anxious to complete.

First things first, though. As soon as I’ve resumed writing my weekly column, in all likelihood, I’ll feel like I’m on top of everything else.

Going Underground

The coffee is okay. Perhaps a little too nutty for my taste. It’s probably one of the same discount brands on offer in the deli. However, the piadina sandwiches are pretty good, during the winter it’s always warm inside, and there’s a newsstand with an excellent selection of international newspapers less than twenty feet away.

Located in the tube station underneath our building, I increasingly find myself eschewing above-ground establishments in Piazzale Loreto in favor of this cafe’s womb-like environs. Despite the fact that it’s always busy, there’s something calming about the cheap cappuccinos and availability of familiar news periodicals.

Like the majority of the cafes in our neighborhood, it is also full of foreigners. Eavesdrop on any of the conversations taking place and one will hear everything from Albanian and Arabic to Portugese and Tagalog. If I have any difficulty ordering, there’s oftentimes one or two Peruvians on staff whom I can speak to in Spanish.

If you were to ask me for an example of present day Milan, I’d be hard-pressed to offer something more au courant. No, its not Peck, or one of the hip cafes in Isola or Brera, where the coffee is indeed superior. It’s the fact that this place is both so totally comfortable and contrary, simultaneously, to Italy, as we imagined it to be.