Joel Schalit

Ambient Life

There wasn’t a day that he wasn’t there. If he wasn’t standing at the bottom of the stairs, leading down from our side of Piazzale Loreto, he’d be in the middle of the tunnel, connecting one side of the square to the other. Whether it was hot or it was cold, the same sock hat was always affixed to his head. Upon reflection, I can’t remember when he wasn’t wearing a down jacket, either.

I always assumed that the guy was deaf. I don’t know what lead me to conclude that. Blindness is not the same thing. Nonetheless, I’ve always unconsciously equated the two. Carrying my recording equipment through our underground station, taking pictures of the adverts, recording the sounds of the Milanese, I always found myself turning off the mic when I passed him by.

I wasn’t so disciplined with my camera. After six months, I finally gave in and took this picture last winter. Editing audio recordings I made in the Loreto tube station, I was reminded of this photograph. Somehow, I imagined, he saw me.

Open-Air Gallery

South Asian-focused photo exhibit. South Asian migrant workers. Via Padova, Milan. February 2010.

Click for larger photo.

Talking Turkey

Compare the messaging. The first image, on the left, is a campaign flyer for Italy’s anti-immigrant Lega Nord party, photographed in March, outside our apartment in Milan.  Notice the Turkish national flag depicted subsuming the northern Italian province of Lombardy.

The image on the right is a government-commissioned poster offering support to Turkish immigrants, displayed at a train station in Berlin. Given how accustomed we’d become to seeing Lega posters the past year, the German advert’s vibe took us totally by surprise.

Designing Disenchantment

“I’m so over Italy,” said an American relative who spent many years working in the country. “It’s just too frustrating these days.” Indeed, if one were to read British news periodicals, after Israel, the Italians have the second worst reputation. Based on the behavior of Italy’s political leadership during the year that we lived in Milan, it’s not difficult to understand why.

The hardest part in explaining why isn’t in criticizing Berlusconi, or any of the boorish, racist behavior of his cabinet members. They’re too easy to disassemble, since they are already such grotesquely exaggerated caricatures in their own right. The challenge is to provide the kinds of examples of their misrule, that would lead others, outside of Italy, to actually care.

For me, that means finding ways to narratively represent how utterly depressing it was, for example, to be invited to a sumptuous dinner at a Mediaset journalist’s home, and told how strongly she backed a government proposal to impose quotas on immigrants in public schools. “How can we tolerate a situation where we Italians are a minority in our own classrooms?” she asked.

I can cite so many instances like these, some far worse even, mixed up with far more mundane everyday events, all of which communicate the same thing. That’s the advantage, I think, one gets, living in a particular place for any length of time. If you pay proper attention to what’s going on around you, all the elements are there to mount the most effective kinds of criticism.

A disenchanted Italian is responsible for the poster. Pasted to a lamp post, in Navigli, some time in January.

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.

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.

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.