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.

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.

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.

The Money Channel

Self-explanatory. Watching TV in Rome, January 31st.

Middle Eastern Advertising

Migrant worker-directed mobile phone advert. Loreto station, 12/09.

Turkish Christmas

In the US, Jews are known to go out for Chinese food on Christmas day. In Milan, I’m not so sure. The only Jews we know are Israelis, who are more likely to go out for Italian food, irrespective of the actual occasion. This evening we decided to get doner kebab piadinas, with several pieces of baklava, and a free side of fries thrown in for good measure.

Special Holiday Insert

Anti-Flag wasn’t allowed into Ramallah. Malpensa airport gift shop, 12/17.

Keywords

Searching for an Edward Hopper exhibit on Sunday, we happened upon a stage being prepared for Silvio Berlusconi.  Several hours later, the Prime Minister was assaulted within two or three meters of this location.

Watching the news over dinner, the proximity of the event felt especially unnerving. Relatively private, without many local acquaintances, it was a visceral reminder of where we are, and how deeply we’ve become tied to it.