Italian Snacks

Italian snacks are simply better, in part because they’re — well, simple. Example: on the return flight from Milano, via Alitalia, we get taralli. This is an old Pugliese concoction, amounting to breadsticks tied in a knot. There’s not much to them other than flour, oil, salt, and — secret weapon — rosemary. They’re maybe the best snack I’ve ever had on a plane. More substantial than potato chips. More crunchy than peanuts. A tiny bag goes a long way toward stanching the hunger we’ve amassed while delayed on the runway. Why can’t we get these on American flights? For that matter, why can’t we get these in American bars, or at baseball games?

Another example: the aperitivo. Things can get complicated here, but let’s start with the fundamentals. Every day at approximately 6:30 or 7:00 — the pre-dinner hour — Italians converge on local restaurants, balconies, or merely kitchen tables to down a glass of wine or a beer. If you’re at home, you break out a snack — a bowl of taralli, say. But if you’re out, the snack comes to you. In its default form it’ll be potato chips, plus maybe a bowl of olives. From there things can get more involved: small cubes of focaccia, or frittata, or slender pizza wedges. You might get some fette of salami or prosciutto. You don’t have to ask for these things; they’re included with your drink. Better still, you don’t have to pay for them. I have no idea how Italian restaurateurs, from the smallet to the grandest, make this work economically — especially given that drink prices tend to be lower than in the US. But make it work they do. The practice is universal. In Italy, apparently, drinking is truly inseparable from eating, even if part of what’s consumed are the operator’s margins.

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On a not-so-related note: Once upon a time, those of us accustomed to the alacrity of the US business approach to customer service had a choice in Italy: wallow in frustration, or write it off as quaint and old world, which is to say dying. A decade or so later, maybe the teacher could stand to learn something from the former student.

Because one of the great turnarounds in recent memory seems to have taken place, in an industry — and a country — known less for turnaround than for flameout. Alitalia, the public-private, semi-nationalized airline of Italy, has had more lives than European cats, most of them courtesy of the Italian taxpayer. It’s been bailed out no fewer than three times in my own memory, which reaches back only to when I started paying attention (and flying it) thirteen years ago when I met my wife. Nothing seemed to help. Those of us who flew wondered at only one thing, which was why anybody bothered.

The catalog of laments was thick. Inept service, when one got service at all. Long lines, manned by personnel who seemed uninformed and unconcerned. Air stewards and stewardesses who dressed and carried themelves as if they’d just come — unsuccessfully — from a season of The Universe’s Next Most Luscious and Sexy, and were blaming passengers for their early exit. Flubbed orders; lost baggage; misdirected seating. I’ve seen drinks tossed from one aisle to a customer two aisles over, just to save a trip. Flying Alitalia was like being imprisoned — only for 8 to 12 hours, but still — in a nightmare compendium of every gruesome customer service philosophy that ever plagued the state of Italy herself — a state that, for decades, it’s worth remembering, blended a socialist vision of commercial effort with an absolute sense of its own unerring judgment on dress, food, and social graces. Work was something other airlines did — those less attractive, less tastefully heedless of profits.

Today, that had all changed. From the instant of checkin, through boarding, seating, drink service, lunch service, snacking and general inflight comportment, Alitalia was — to us, today at least — unfailingly professional, organized, prompt, courteous, knowledgable, even kind. It was among the better flying experiences I’ve had. In fact I scarcely noticed I was having an experience at all, except when I needed to.

United-Continental, don’t look now: those footsteps you hear might be coming from fine Tuscan leather.

We'll See You Next Time

We used to be a Backyardigans family. Those were the days. Now we're lucky to see one or two episodes a month. Our son's moved on, and not for the better. First it was Thomas the Tank Engine. Only the recent ones, of course, with the high-class animation. Fair enough. Then it was a Richard Scarry cartoon with loud colors, food-shaped vehicles, and cats voiced so squawkily they sound like — well, cats. Then it was Dragon Tales. This may be the most carefully inoffensive show on television. Everyone's nice. And when someone's not nice, everyone else reminds him, in measured, therapeutically benevolent tones, how this lack of niceness is making them feel pretty un-nice in turn, and how much nicer it would be if the offender would return to being, yes, nice. It makes me want to spend an afternoon kicking puppies in order to right the cosmic balance. In a show about dragons, is it wrong to expect a little fire breathing?

Most recently, he's become a fan of Kipper. This is a show about dogs, mostly. British dogs. And a pig. And the pig's baby. None of them do much, which was in fact the subject of an episode he watched recently. "Nothing ever really happens," Kipper told his friend Tiger. "Hmm," replied Tiger. Cut to weird animations of dancing bunnies. Apparently the target demographic is split between the pre-school set and college stoners.

Kipper, all things considered, was a big step up. Still, it was a relief when we were able to talk Luca into not one but two Backyardigans episodes last night. Like going home again, except to the future.

This is the way television should be made. And I don't just mean children's television. There's more creativity and talent squeezed into one Backyardigans episode than an entire season of Gossip Girls. You got music. You got singing, dancing. Stories, too: they reference Shakespeare and Orson Welles and James Bond. Every character has a voice actor; that pretty much goes without saying. But each also has a dance proxy — a professional who executes her choreography for the animators, who reproduce it thus not just with accuracy but with the characer's individual style.

This is a cartoon, you will recall. For 2 to 6 year olds.

Choreography. Yes, that's what I wrote.

I sense your skepticism. Let me offer an example. An episode from the first season, entitled "Riding the Range": the music's a blend of broken hip-hop beats, thorny jazz piano, ethereal trumpet, and clanky banjo: what you might get in a more fullsome version of The Bad Plus. The line dance that closes the show takes its rhythmic cues from hip hop and its footwork from Wyoming truck-stop ballet, all over a mashup of John Hodges' Buffalo Gals and a tune that might have been written by Diggable Planets. The story itself is an existential paradox in which the main characters chase an imaginary jump-rope bandit. Whenever they run into trouble, help comes — from the very character they think they're chasing.

It ain't Sesame Street.

Worth noting: the show's musical director is Evan Lurie, a minor legend of the downtown New York para-jazz scene and co-founder of the genre-bending Lounge Lizards. This is a guy with serious cred. He's worked with Mark Ribot, Oren Bloedow, Kenny Wollesen, John Medeski and Curtis Fowlkes. It doesn't add up till you discover that The Backyardigans features a different musical genre — or, often enough, blend of genres — in each episode. So you get bossa nova in "Castaways," late disco in "Quest for the Flying Rock," Hatfieldian alt-rock in "Elephant on the Run," Parliamentary funk in "Garbage Trek," flamenco in "Who Goes There," and Italianate opera in "Catch That Butterfly." And the thing is, they're all done really well.

The Backyardigans isn't made any longer, much to our sadness. We got four glorious seasons, only three and a half of which are available on Netflix, our own children's programming source. It's not hard to guess why the producers called it quits. A single episode seems to require a level of production firepower — creative, financial, temporal — that'd barely be sustainable on a prime time budget, much less in the kid-tv ghetto. Good things, like childhood, must come to an end.

That's another built-in theme of the show. They're called the "backyardigans" because each episode takes place in one of the main characters' backyards. When the episode begins, the characters are themselves. They're dressed up, maybe; they carry a prop or two; but they're recognizable as themselves, here and now, at play on a suburban lawn. They sing a song. And then suddenly the world melts away. Fences and patios sink; castles, forests, oceans and flying saucers rise in their place. And the characters are no longer present-day "kids": they're kings and detectives, knights or monsters. I've always found this part touching and ingenious, as near a recreation as I can recall of what it feels like to relinquish to the call of imagination.

At episode's end the process rewinds. Fantasy slips away and they're once more home, in the backyard, here and now. Gone are the castles. Gone are the dragons. It's swingsets and sandboxes, lawns that will someday need to be mowed. (Alas, someday soon.) There's something elegaic, maybe even heroic, about the way the characters march off together to comfort one another, celebrate and recollect the day's play. With a snack.

As if, somehow, they can sense it: how fleeting this all is, and how near the impending end.

Takers and Makers

"We risk hitting a tipping point in our society where we have more takers than makers … President Obama's policies are feverishly putting more people in the column of being takers than makers. We're going to either have a taker society or a maker society. The president is trying to create more of a permanent class of government dependents."

— Paul Ryan, August 11, 2012

What's curious about this is the imbalance between the intensity of the fear — that, as Ryan puts it, we'll soon have more 'takers,' fewer 'makers' — and the utter lack of specificity. No evidence. No statistics. The congressman doesn't explain what a 'taker' is, as opposed to a 'maker.' He doesn't tell us how many 'takers' we had before Obama or how many we have now. We're not at all sure it's a thing we can measure. Last but not least, he doesn't tell us which of "President Obama's policies" are responsible for the threat, or how they effect the transformation from maker into taker.

My guess as to why he doesn't divulge these things is twofold. First, I suspect the stats here are dicey. Even if one could arrive at a definition for 'maker' and a corresponding one for 'taker,' statistics are unlikely to tell a clean, clear story about either over the last four years. What's more, the origin of most of the bad news is unlikely to be anything Obama's done. It'll all root in the 2008 crash. Ryan's hyperventilatingly anti-regulatory campaign doesn't want to discuss what pretty much everyone with a pulse agrees are the dire consequences of underregulation.

Second, and more significantly: drawing clear lines between 'takers' and 'makers' is almost certainly an act of political suicide. The unemployment rolls have expanded dramatically since the financial crash; Congress has extended unemployment benefits multiple times since 2009. Are recipients of government largesse such as these a great new batch of 'takers,' or are they merely 'makers' in a temporary pinch of outside provenance?

It gets more granular, and more dangerous for Ryan. A unionized worker in an auto factory: taker, or maker? A two-income family relying on mortgage assistance to escape forclosure: takers, or makers? For that matter, any homeowner making use of the mortgage interest deduction: takers, the lot of us?

Or how about this: Rex Tillerson, chairman of Exxon Corp, which receives billions in tax exemptions each fiscal year: taker, or maker? Or Wes Bush, CEO of Northrup Grumman, beneficiary of $5 billion in government contracts last year — taker or maker? And how about this: the DoD wants to kill the Abrams tank; it's old and irrelevant, they say. Congress has lined up to keep making it anyway, and to force the Pentagon to keep buying it, at taxpayer expense amounting to nearly $300 million. If Congress succeeds, will everyone who thenceforth works on an Abrams tank component be a taker? How about the execs at General Dynamics, which makes it? Better still (and if the Obama campaign doesn't ask this, they don't deserve to win): General Motors — makers, or takers?

You can see where this goes. 'Maker society' and 'taker society' are pretty tightly entwined. Most makers are, or were, takers of some kind. Most takers are also makers, or were; and most expect to be again.

So who's Ryan talking about? What's Ryan talking about?

Somebody wanna ask?

This is what it looks like

Take Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher's Times piece on Apple, Shenzhen, and the present and future of manufacturing. Add Ryan Lizza's analysis of Obama's presidential arc via analysis of White House memos. Throw in the Republican primaries, including the debates. Especially the debates. But the ads too. And the buses and the bumper stickers and the ad-hoc one-off talking-head moments they keep getting, and taking, each week.

I know of no response to the aggregated impact of these three recent phenomena but despair.

The Chinese say — or so we're told; where's John Huntsman when you need him? — "May you live in interesting times." And I suppose even car pileups are interesting enough to make us slow down. But this is starting to feel like being strapped into a chair in front of a giant screen filled by hi-def, slow-mo footage of a train smashing inch by inch into the side of a black granite mountain. And the straps are really tight and the train is really, really long.

The British Are ... Here!

Around my house, this holiday season has brought a British invasion. They've come after the kids as well as the grown-ups. And I have to say it: they're winning.

The most dangerous assault has come from Downton Abbey. Who'd've guessed? PBS; Masterpiece Theater; English manor dramas — it scarcely sends shivers. But Downton is saucy. Racy. And funny. And we're only three episodes in.

It's impossible to neglect, though, the flanking maneuver being mounted by Thomas and Friends. Yes, I know: trains. With faces. From Britain. Ghastly. But Thomas has overrun our three year old and shown no mercy in the triumph. I doesn't help that the digital facelift given to these lethargic storylines turns out to be pretty stellar. I cringe when I hear all the talk of usefulness, but the glossed-up, high-color renderings of trains and bridges and forests and countrysides are lovely when compared to the cartoons of my own youth.

In our defeat we're hardly alone. If anything we are, in both cases, late to succumb. Downton is a hit. And Thomas has been charming post-toddlers, and costing their parents fortunes in the process, since the middle of the last century. The animations may have improved, but the stolid trains and their drive to be "really useful" are as worn and loved as a favorite stuffed doll.

Nor is that the end of it. Anglophilia is soaring, from Will & Kate nuptials — more American viewers than Charles and Diana — and their post-facto intrigues (did Pippa steal the show? Was Grace passing judgment, or just sleepy?) to The Iron Lady and, of all things, Thatcherstalgia. Rule Britania, indeed. We are having a national moment.

I'd like to think Britishness as such is incidental to these victories. But I'm not sure that's the case. In fact, it — Britishness — may be crucial. Why?

One possibility: the collapse of empire. America has entered its period of long, slow, irreversible decline. Who better to serve as our guide? The Brits suffered the disintegration of the greatest empire the world's ever known, and they did it in recent memory — within a generation or two, if you stretch. What's more, they did it — arguably, and as long as you're not Indian — with class. Stiff upper lip, honor of family: we have much to learn from these people who let fortune and cultural dominance slide from their grasp with neither communist whimper nor fascist convulsion. And they remain a powerhouse of the global economy and one of the most formidably expensive places on the face of the earth, no small consolation to New Yorkers who fear losing their position in the pecking order of financial suffering.

But there's more. The message of Downton is that the great ebb offers randiness and prickly sarcasm as well as luxury. It's a swell decline. The ladies are willing, upstairs and down; the men are rakes and charlies. Or, when they're not, they're decent sorts, or interestingly cruel at a minimum. It's Britain's 1% taking on its 99%, with costumes and manners.

Thomas, on the other hand, is all about comfort. What could manifest the holiday season more aptly than trains — especially trains that aim to please?

Worker pride is the crux of Thomas and Friends. There's no higher praise than to be called "really useful," and it's this toward which all engines strive. Pronouncement of utility — or lack thereof — falls to the ubiquitous "Sir Topham Hat," who runs the railroads of Sodor, the imaginary island on which the trains operate. (Each episode begins with a poetic paean to Sodor, almost like an anthem: praises for its rivers and streams, its mountains, and of course its well-tended railways.) Duty and honor are prized. But there's also plenty of room for forgiveness. Sir Topham Hat may be grouchy, but he's also benevolent, ready to overlook near-constant slipups by his workforce. Each storyline seems to involve one or more of the engines becoming so enraptured by good but misguided intentions that he threatens the entire business. Contrition follows, then absolution, then heroic efforts that "set things right." The final blessing — that all's well, everyone's turned out to be "really useful" after all — brings down the curtain of comfort and order.

We're mixed up. Maybe that's what it means. We can't let go of our voyeurism — our desire to see, to walk among the 1%, imagine the unimaginable opulence of their days. But we need to sense that it's crumbling, too. We want to feel the winds of change ripping through the drawing rooms as surely as they do the basement laundries and kitchens — which is to say, the places we'd most likely find our own selves in.

Class imprisons the Brits. Mostly, it only confuses their American cousins. On the one hand we hate it. On the other we're conditioned to believe it's accessible — that we can achieve it; and we hate the notion that by the time our own personal turn rolls around there'll be nothing left to get excited about. What's the point in striving if there's no promised land for the arriving?

What Americans are not confused by — at least not yet — is the honor of work. Perhaps this is Thomas's secret. Like the trains of Sodor — or like the denizens of the Downton servants' quarters — we don't mind working for someone. In fact, we long for it, now more than ever. We just want our work to be recognized. And valued.

Which is to say: we don't mind there being a 1%. We just want that 1% to care.

And, of course, to gracefully wither away.

Post-Occupied: A Follow Up

From last night, evidence that the devolution is nearly complete.

Note that the substantive argument is completely absent from this episode; it's now a struggle between protesters and police over turf and process. A descent into pure tribalism.

Part of this is a function of the coverage, of course. Media tends to want to see conflict as binary, and tends toward the scorecard view. Protesters on the 5-yard line; police mount a spirited defense to push them back.

But much of it's due, again, to the protesters' own approach. They seem to understand it in binary fashion. Have a look at OWS's own blog; note the implicit — and explicit — definitions of success. "What will you occupy in 2012?" reads one invitational poster. The question isn't "Whose lives will we improve in 2012?" It isn't "Who will we elect?" or "What legislation will we pass?" The poster doesn't ask, "How will we reform the tax code?" or "How will we fight inequality?" or even "How will we redistribute wealth?"

"Occupation," it seems, is both means and end.

As long as this continues, I'd guess OWS is destined for increasing petulance, followed by irrelevance.

What's more, and weirder: consider the potential for cooptation. Since it's not a whole lot more, now, than a collection of tactics bound to raw emotion (rather than a platform or course of action), it's possible "occupations" and the invocation of "occupation" as a method could proliferate into political and psychic territories unimagined by the original Wall Street protesters. If it happens, this could have two ill effects. The first would be to further dilute the political impact of OWS by clouding the already murky message. The second could be to provide yet another vehicle for the expression of reactionary rage. Why couldn't a splinter branch of the tea party — some group way out on the libertarian fringe — stage its own "occupation," observing the protocols and vocabulary but binding them to a diffusely right-wing vision rather than the current diffusely left-wing vision?

Which, I guess, raises the question — again — of the ethics of outcomes, and whether or not OWS would care.