Joel Schalit

Bringing Home the Bacon

At the top of my parents’ list of requests was prosciutto. They wanted a kilo and a half.

“We service Silvio Berlusconi,” said the butcher as he slid the meat into three separate half-kilo packets. “We send it straight to Rome, at his request. We even handled the ham for the G8 meeting in Genoa, in 2001.”

With endorsements like that, how could I refuse the sixty-four Euro price tag? Truth be told, of course I would have paid that much. This was for family. I just wasn’t sure I’d ever spent that kind of money buying lunch meat before.

Granted, this wasn’t any ham. It was two year-old prosciutto from Parma. But, I figured that since I was taking it to Israel, to be consumed on Shabbat by a bunch of hungry relatives, at the height of the swine flu crisis, every penny was worth it.

Milan, Not Jerusalem

What’s wrong with this picture? Carabinieri, not Magav. Piazza San Babila, 25/4/09.

A Different Kind of Messaging

Imagine commemorating the end of the Second World War positively. That is, not as the end of the Holocaust, the beginning of the Cold War, or the conclusion of the accomplishments of ‘the greatest generation‘, but as a sincere victory over fascism,  as an achievement of the left. So passed yesterday’s celebratory activities here in Milan, to mark the 64th anniversary of the liberation of Italy from the Nazis.

Walking through the Piazza del Duomo,  my ex-bandmate in the Christal Methodists, Brock Craft, took this picture at a demonstration. Offering a familiar selection of radical chic, what’s most interesting is the OSX-looking Skype window on the video screen in the background. It takes a little more time to translate than Che and Lenin, but boy if it doesn’t make you want to take a 2nd look.

Home Decorating

Sometimes I think we live in an art gallery. For friends and acquaintances who’ve spent time in our homes over the years, that’s not too far from the truth. Jennifer and I have collected political posters and paintings since our teens. We’ve always tried to find as much wall space for them as we could. Constructivist repros from the USSR, Jen’s own paintings, Spanish-language USAID propaganda from the ’60s. We’ve hung it all.

Perhaps the greatest frustration we have with our new apartment is that we are prohibited from putting anything on the walls. Covered by a combination of shelves, mirrors, and furniture, it is more than likely that we’ll keep nearly all of our art in storage for the next couple of years. In the interim, we have an entire lobby full of hilarious reproductions like this painting of Napoleon, above, to look at, every time we enter our building.

One of fifteen or so vintage reproductions typically on display in the hallway, this painting does a good job of interfacing with the martial-looking marble of our Mussolini-era apartment building. Italian Bauhaus, for lack of a better way of describing it, the place is a veritable monument to a time in this country’s history when art like this was appreciated. Not just for its kitsch value, but the values its supposed to embody.

That’s why the anti-racist posters we frequently find pasted to the outside of our building, like this advert for a Communist-sponsored cultural event, are always a kick in the pants to see after indulging the nostalgia inside. Not neccessarily the most interesting in terms of design, their combination of contemporary aesthetic sensibilities with leftist politics nonetheless completes the overall artistic experience of our new European home.

Last Day in London

The day after I returned our rental van at the Europcar office on Clapham High Street, I flew back to Milan, formally concluding our half-year sojourn in the UK. Before I left, I made sure to purchase copies of my two favorite British periodicals, and read them on the flight home.

Given how hard we struggled while we were in town, our only consistent solace was having access to what remains, in my view, one of the most interesting news industries in the world. As has often been said about the BBC’s World Service, British newspapers and magazines oftentimes project a more ideal United Kingdom.

Well, not every publication, by any stretch of the imagination. Take a look at the country’s tabloids, for example. They’re equally representative. But, the inclination to say so, when one can only attribute such sentiments to four or five publications in toto, says a lot about the cultural significance of said periodicals.

One Man’s Fruit

The only time I can remember grocery shopping as a child was walking through the produce section of a Safeway store in London in the late 1970s. Examining the oranges, my father picked one up and beamed at it as though it were a bar of gold. “See the Jaffa sticker on here,” Elie said, as he pointed to the big and round juicy-looking fruit. “This comes from home. The Europeans are buying our produce.”

Walking through our local supermarket last Friday, the words on this cardboard box leaped out at me, as though my father was again pointing out the same produce to me, to signify our new presence, here in Italy. Dropping my shopping basket, I pulled out my camera, and began taking pictures, hoping to find some aspect of this scene that was worth remembering.

In a city flooded with stickers and flyers urging consumers to boycott Israeli products, you can understand why. Nothing epitomizes the onetime health and naturalness of Israel’s post-colonial economy as the Jaffa orange. In many respects, even though it was long ago superseded by the microchip, the Israeli-branded fruit still carries this significance, as a political symbol. Hence the hand grenade.

She Wears the Pants

We left the US seven months ago. Transferred to her firm’s new office in London, my wife had been tasked with helping build her San Francisco-based employer’s European presence. Having taken the job with the expectation of eventually being placed abroad, we were immensely gratified. We were leaving San Francisco, finally, as we’d hoped. Not just to Europe, but to London, with guaranteed employment.

Unfortunately, we never got to enjoy the UK. Departing during the second week of the credit crunch, (amidst a parallel meltdown within my wife’s company, no less), Jennifer’s firm completely destabilized. Unable to buy simple things like staplers and stationery, and provide monitors for the staff to work on, it appeared as though we’d made a terrible choice. We’d moved six thousand miles only to get laid off, or so it seemed.

That never did happen, though Jennifer and her colleagues came exceedingly close to being sent home. The fear of being shut down, however, never quite went away, and we spent six months with our bags unpacked, without any of our belongings, looking for a way out. Jennifer’s former boss did little to dissuade us otherwise, advising us to not ship our container into London upon its arrival in Southampton last November.

When Jennifer finally landed a new gig, in Italy, it was the first time we felt like we’d really arrived. Not in the metaphorical sense, but a literal one. Unlike many similar companies, the firm that hired Jennifer had the stability she was looking for, and had maintained an active European presence for over three decades. There was no new ground to break, or learning curve to master. Despite the horrible economic climate, this company still had its hands full. We could move to Milan in good conscience.

We’ve spent the last two weeks looking back on our past half-year, and marveled at how we managed to survive. Everything that could have gone wrong did. Everything that could be extrapolated about the collapse of the Anglo-American economy seemed to manifest itself in our lives. Though we bear no ill-will towards Jennifer’s former firm, we feel immensely relieved to be outside its troubled grip, and finally on dry land.

My wife’s determination to perservere, and to continue to enjoy a career she’s spent nearly two decades cultivating never ceases to amaze me. I know very few people who’ve stayed such a course, for so long. Jennifer’s strength and focus definitely saw us through. Even more amazing was her desire to remain abroad, and not return to the US, despite how bad everything is, everywhere. Sometimes, you know you’re right, irrespective of the circumstances. Jennifer’s conviction has always been its own reward. The rest is gravy.

Make Me Clean

They say clothes make the man. So, obviously, does your laundry detergent. Pam supermarket, Milan. Good Friday eve.

Got My Eye On You

I used to think that London was the capital of European street art. Living in Milan has made me reconsider that assumption. The intensity of the tagging and political postering here is overwhelming.

This detournement, using an anti-military flyer, is located inside a small municipal park a few blocks away from our apartment, on Padova street, in the middle of an Arab-Latino immigrant ‘hood.

Click on the photo for more detail.

Illustrating Israel

On our drive back to London, we spent an all-too-short night at a friend of a friend’s apartment in Paris. Located in the Marais, two blocks away from the Pompidou, we had more than our fair share of things to see, including a bakery window display featuring a loaf of bread fashioned into a pair of testicles.

The day after a big anti-occupation demonstration, what most caught my eye were all the leftover stickers and flyers decrying Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. So surprised were we by this re-purposed Carlos Latuff poster above, I jumped out of our van while it was still moving and took a few pictures.

If you’re not familiar with Latuff’s cartoons, and you follow the treatment of the Arab-Israeli conflict by contemporary visual artists, you ought to be. At times reminiscent of Black Flag-era Raymond Pettibon (think My War), the Brazilian artist is as synonymous with this subject matter as Banksy.

I personally don’t like Latuff’s work as much. At times I find it a little too didactic and lacking in nuance. Its not as though there isn’t a place for that, but it doesn’t always work for me, irrespective of my political differences with Latuff. Nonetheless, when Latuff transcends cliché, the results can be substantial.

Even for jaded progressives like my traveling companions, (one of whom has illustrated a significant amount of politically-charged record covers), this depiction of an Israeli Apache gunship firing an air-to-ground missile at a child still succeeded in making their hearts skip a beat – or two. As it was designed to do.